ABSTRACT
Mal Peet’s Exposure, set in a fictitious South American country, uses Othello to explore the issue of class, particularly in the street kids whose fates mix with wealthy celebrities and murderous politicians. Both novels point to Shakespeare’s global reach and reinvent their Shakespearean source text by de-emphasizing race. Since the nineteenth century, in the United States Othello has been seen through the lenses of white supremacy, slavery, blackface minstrelsy, segregation, and racial intolerance, and productions in the country continue to be racialized. Perhaps Othello is merely the vehicle to get at something beyond race, something specific, something necessary to bring to the fore in a particular country in the Global South. Young adult literature often creates space to investigate issues that matter to a younger demographic. As Poonam Trivedi has written of Asian intercultural Shakespeare, an “enacted and em-body-ed Shakespeare speak[s] across time, space, language, culture, genre, and gender”.
