states and populations, Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa “impose[d]...a
general explanation, on the whole place,” as John Ryle has protested, com-
pressing its many nations, peoples, languages, identities into “a single reality,”
as if there were one Africa and one overarching problem that could be fixed
simply by “stimulating trade, increasing aid, tackling corruption, cancelling
debt.”^20 Or consider the U.S. response to the crisis in Darfur at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. In a New York Timeseditorial (August 8 , 2006 ),
Nicholas Kristof presents that history comparatively as “the tale of two mili-
tary interventions, of which one happened and the other didn’t.”^21 “Three
weeks ago,” he writes:
with President Bush supplying the weaponry and moral support, Israel
began bombarding Lebanon. The war has killed hundreds of people,
galvanized international attention and may lead to an international
force of perhaps 20 , 000 peacekeepers. Three years ago, Sudan began a
genocide against African tribes in its Darfur region. That war has killed
hundreds of thousands of people, and it is now spreading. There is talk
of U.N. peacekeepers someday, but none are anywhere in sight. The
moral of the story? Never, ever be born to a tribe that is victim to
genocide in Africa.^22In Britain’s case the sweep, and in America’s, the selectivity, of the govern-
ment’s putatively global vision has obscured the distinctive histories of
“African” subjects, skewing or erasing their importance in a crisis-ridden
world.
Or, to turn to literary terrains, consider what Celia Daileader has tagged
“Othellophilia,” a long-standing Anglo-American obsession with “the Othello
myth,” with the disturbing play of the “black male” against the white female
he “tups.”^23 This fixation, as Daileader charts it, registers a color-based racial
(and gendered) difference as thesource of contention. But when Shakespeare
plays and replays the Othellomyth himself, culture trumps color as what gives
potentially deadly unions their twist of difference: in Much Ado About Noth-
ing( 1598 – 99 ) Claudio is a Florentine, his betrothed, a daughter of Messina;
inThe Winter’s Tale( 1610 – 11 ) Leontes is Sicilian, his wife, daughter of a
Muscovite. In Cymbeline( 1609 – 10 ), the embedded Othellostory of a noble
husband ingeniously coerced into doubting his wife’s chastity plays out across
the tensions of family, with Imogen, the heir apparent of Britain, made vul-
nerable by her choice to marry Posthumus, himself displaced and replaced as
8 introduction