DeGravelles, Karin H. “You Be Othello: Interrogating Identification in the Classroom.”
Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 153-175. EBSCOhost, doi: 10.1215/15314200-2010- 021. Accessed 7 July 2021.
In “You Be Othello: Interrogating Identification in the Classroom,” Karin DeGravelles argues that in teaching Othello, it is our responsibility, as teachers and readers, to engage with the play in a way that focuses attention on those “who have been harmed,” as opposed to the traditional literary elements (172). She says that in doing so, we can inspect the play with a focus on historical trauma. Through her investigation, DeGravelles addresses the multiple “permeable” lines that separate areas such as “fiction and reality, past and present, or the world of students and the world of Shakespeare’s text” (153). DeGravelles dives into these permeable lines through five different discussion points that lead to her claim. First, she argues against mere teaching of identification because it is influenced heavily by “performance choices, including the choice to perform at all” (158). For example, how an actor plays a part or even what they look like can affect an audience’s ability to identify with that character and will change with each performance. Further, an actor’s role or identification shapes the performance of the play, as DeGravelles cites an example of an actor who so identified with Othello and became him on stage that he scared the actress playing Desdemona (159). These discussions then transition into the pedagogical practices, including a push for performance techniques that “reveal much about the play that purely textual approaches do not” (163). When students have the opportunities to read, perform, or act out scenes, they engage with the text in ways that having a teacher read aloud cannot reach. Finally, DeGravelles ends her discussion by reaching her claim through a discussion on race and pedagogy, admitting that many teachers avoid teaching Othello in the classroom because of its potentially sensitive nature, but that is the very reason it should be taught in the first place.
--Michelle Vucsko
