“‘Not a Moor Exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race.”

Corredera, Vanessa. “‘Not a Moor Exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 30–50, http://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2016.0009. Accessed 21 July 2021.

Corredera argues that when teaching Shakespeare’s plays, specifically Othello, educators should use the term race when discussing early modern conceptions of Otherness. Although scientific understanding of race did not emerge until the 17th century, Elizabethans established Otherness through markers such as religion, skin color, locale, and exoticism. Corredera cites the work of other early modern scholars who agree that constructions of race today are no more stable than they were during the Renaissance, and not necessarily grounded in biology: factors such as language, culture, religion, appearance, and ethnicity still influence contemporary ideas of race (Corredera 30-32). To illustrate, Corredera points to the podcast Serial: This American Crime, which followed the trial of Pakistani American teenager Adnan Syed, convicted of murdering his Korean girlfriend. Journalist and host Sarah Koenig confused religion with race when she said authorities were not motivated by “anti-Muslim feeling, by racism” (Corredera 38). Jury members struggled to define Syed’s Otherness, mistakenly referring to his “Arabic” culture (Pakistanis are not Arabs), and associating him with stereotypes of “how they treat their women” “over there” – even though defendant and jurors all lived in Baltimore, sharing the same culture (Corredera 39-40). Even for informed and educated people, facets of identity outside of biology such as religion and ethnicity still inform conceptions of the Other, making it vital to recognize race in Shakespeare’s works (Corredera 41-45).

--Jess Fraser

“Authentic Protest, Authentic Shakespeare, Authentic Africans: Performing Othello in South Africa”

Distiller, Natasha. “Authentic Protest, Authentic Shakespeare, Authentic Africans: Performing Othello in South Africa.” Comparative Drama, vol. 46, no. 3, 2012, pp. 339-354. Project Muse, doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2012.0023.

In this essay, Natasha Distiller considers whether Othello is a racist play, considering it was written by a white man and intended for a white actor in blackface to play the part of the black character. She develops this consideration through a look at Janet Suzman’s 1987 production of Othello in apartheid South Africa, which served as a “protest play” for South African policies surrounding race. Ultimately, Distiller argues that Shakespeare’s work isn’t racist, but rather a powerful tool that can provide meaning to a given cultural context. She says that Othello will mean different things to different people depending on the cultural context of the play’s presentation, including the time and place it is staged in. She begins by discussing the comments of Shakespeare critic James Earl Jones, who said that Othello shouldn’t be looked at from a perspective of race, but should instead be explored as a “classic” piece of literature with universal themes that do not include race. However, Distiller argues that black actors cannot ignore their black identity while playing the part of Othello, making it impossible to not make Othello about race, for how can one expect a black actor to play this role as a black man in a white world without being aware of his own blackness? Distiller then discusses how Suzman, in her 1987 production of Othello as a protest play in apartheid South Africa, has deliberately placed Othello into a singular time and place. Instead of centering on the universal themes of the “classics,” she encourages the audience to consider both race and gender issues present in the play, creating a direct link between what is happening in the play and what is happening in South Africa. 

Jenny Jadin

"Re-‘Turning’ Othello: Transformative and Restorative Romance"

Britton, Dennis Austin. “Re-‘Turning’ Othello: Transformative and Restorative Romance.” ELH, 
vol. 78, no. 1, 2011, pp. 27–50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41236533. Accessed 14 July 2021.

            Current Othello critics focus on Othello’s identity as an outsider and on his race; however, Britton argues Othello’s identity as a Christian is more important to the transformative romance popular during that time period, especially in Italy. Britton focuses on transformative romance to emphasize Iago’s goal of restoring Othello’s original religious identity. To emphasize his point, Britton examines other works during this time period that featured the incorporation of non-European people into society, namely Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto and The Moor of Venice by Giraldi Cinthio. One feature of the romance genre is the ability to transform identity. Romance’s ability to convert was popular because Venice encountered people from other lands, so transformation meant acceptance into Venetian society. In order to destroy Othello, Iago cannot only focus on Othello’s race, and Iago, ultimately, failed in doing so in the first Act of the play. Iago must dissimilate Othello’s identity as a Christian since this is what permits him acceptance into Venetian society. Ultimately, Iago succeeds in eliminating Othello’s Christian identity and restores the other feature of the romance genre: the ability to return to the original identity.

- Tracie Yule

Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations

Lupton, Julia."Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations." Representations, vol. Winter, no. 57, 1997, pp. 73-89, www.jstor.org/stable/2928664. 

Lupton asserts that at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare's intent was not to racialize Othello and Desdemona's relationship but to classify this (through Brabantio's perspective) as a cultural difference; Othello being a Gentile and Barbarian and Brabantio's as a Christian convert (from Judaism); with Brabantio's focus on the "family clan" being disrupted from an outsider (Othello), even though Othello is also a Christian convert. (Lupton 76) Lupton supports this premise with writings from "St. Paul's division of humanity Greek, Jew and barbarian..." (74). The Pauline ideology essentially stated that Jews and Muslims were culturally more in common with each other than Christians; a clear contradiction, but apparently justified because of Othello's opaque ethnicity. The author supports part of this premise with the cultural practice of circumcision. 

Because of their similarities, this placed both of them (religions) under equal suspicion during the Renaissance. Othello was a "converted" Christian. Shakespeare draws this connection through Othello being circumcised as him being of the Abrahamic class, at least visually. Despite this, Pauline's ideology argues that religion is in one's heart and not necessarily any outward appearances (circumcision). Because Othello hadn't originated from Europe, he had to come from one of two places; the west of Venice, meaning he would have been a possible Gentile/Barbarian, a pagan along with carrying over barbaric and violent tendencies of the darker west of Africa or east of Venice, (Middle East) denoting an Islamic origin, a lighter color, and closer parallels with Judaism. (Ibid)

In effect, Othello was villainized both racially and ethnically/culturally; it didn't really matter where he came from, he was an outsider and ultimately unwelcomed during the Renaissance. His murder of Desdemona supported the "barbarity" of his supposed western background, his ideology of "permanent justice" for Desdemona's purported adultery arises from his possible eastern influence of Abrahamic justice, but his suicide provided some measure of Christian redemption, allowing the Venetians to focus on his service provided for them. (83-4)

--David Kase

“We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.”

 Smith, Ian. “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1, 2016, pp. 104-124. Project MUSE, doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2016.0000.

     Ian Smith considers the implications that race relations in Othello can have on contemporary racial conflicts in the U.S., such as police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Ultimately, he uses the racial conflicts present in Othello to argue that predominantly white culture, specifically scholars, need to do the internal work necessary in order to 1) fully understand the perspective and unique experience of a person of color and 2) discuss race without a biased lens of white privilege. Smith begins by questioning the reliability of white scholars in accurately representing Othello in their analyses, considering that Othello is a black man and literary scholars are predominately white. Smith says that with primarily white critics, Othello might not get the credit he deserves because white audiences/readers/critics are “unreliable narrators” of Othello’s story (113). Smith then explores how white privilege in the U.S. is mirrored in Othello, pointing toward Othello needing to answer for his skin color when questioned on Desdemona’s love for him, and toward Othello needing to ask his comrades to “speak of” him at the end of the play. Othello must trust that his comrades will accurately reflect his story without their own biases. This is where Smith considers the notion of white privilege in the U.S. and challenges readers and scholars to do the work necessary to develop a reliable representation of Othello’s experience--and of the experience of people of color in general. While it is easy for people who are white to ignore race because they are not confronted with their race on a daily basis, doing so perpetuates white privilege. In order to “speak of” Othello (and by extension, people of color) reliably, we must do the work that allows us to fully understand Othello’s experience; we must align with the sentiment expressed in the article’s title: “We Are Othello.”

Jenny Jadin

"Iago's Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello"

 Adelman, Janet. “Iago's Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2, 1997, pp. 125–144. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2871277. Accessed 4 July 2021.

Janet Adelman’s applies Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to the issues of race in the play to support that the psychological use of racism by the racist, such as Iago, belongs to the perpetrator and not only to the victim who internalizes the psychological twisting of identity. Adelman begins her claim with Iago’s introductory scene; not only does he introduce the audience to his version of Othello, but he also creates a sense of “I” for himself through the focus of his dialogue with Roderigo, his focus of ego seeming to want to compensate in the following acts in contrast to the presence of Othello (127). In contrast to Othello’s wholeness, Othello’s Iago is “nothing” in saying, “I am not what I am” (Shakespeare 1.1.62). In being nothing, Iago seeks to self-divide those around him as he is the true Janus. To “unseat” those who threaten his sexual potency and mastery of self, he uses color and images of body to provoke anxiety both within and outside of the characters. In Iago’s own anxiety that produces envy, he needs to spoil the goodness and beauty of others in order to ensure his sense of uncontaminated self, and, in doing so, projects his filth onto Othello to take the blame for (Adelman 136-37).

--Hannah Nagy

“Making the Beast with two Backs” – Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England.”

 Kaufmann , Miranda. “Making the Beast with two Backs” – Interracial Relationships in Early Modern 

England.”  Literature Compass, 2015, pp.22–37. 

 

SUMMARY 

Miranda’s article is less of an argument, and more of a collection of research on the presence of peoples from the continent of Africa in Europe (primarily Shakespeare’s England).  She pulls from a variety of sources and corroborates much of what Dr Onyeka said in the RSC debate we watched for class. This article is situated among many that use Othello as a foundation for exploring the presence of interracial relationships in Elizabethan England.  Whereas other criticism might focus on racial dynamics in the play, or even on the possibility of Desdemona and Othello’s relationship, Kaufmann endeavors to show that a relationship like theirs was not only possible but very present in England.   As Kaufmann develops her points and covers her research, it becomes clear (although not stated directly) that she trying to disprove the “lascivious moor” stereotype used in Othello.  Her article is divided into three main sections.  The first provides parish records to demonstrate the many legal interracial marriages that occurred during Shakespeare’s time.  Her middle section is much longer and focuses on both illegitimate and legitimate children from interracial relationships.  She also covers how “fornication” was illegal, and the practice of white masters having sex with their Black slaves.  Her final sections explores the possibility of Black female prostitute (of some fame) named Lucy – and whether she is connected at all to Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets.

*Ben Mathews

Decolonizing Othello in Search of Black Feminist North American Identities

Cucarella-Ramon, Vicent. “Decolonizing Othello in Search of Black Feminist

    North American Identities: Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet and Toni Morrison’s

    Desdemona.” International Journal of English Studies (IJES), vol. 17, no. 1,

    2017, pp. 83–97

In “Decolonizing Othello in Search of Black Feminist North American Identities: Djanet Sears' Harlem Duet and Toni Morrison's Desdemona,” Cucarella-Ramon compares Harlem Duet by African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears and Desdemona by Toni Morrison to Shakespeare's Othello and uses them to to carve out a new definition of what it means to be black in North America and Canada. Cucarella-Ramon claims that these texts can be used when looking at the study of (black) identity construction within US and in relation - Canada. Through rethinking and rewriting Othello in the modern era, they create a social and racial reality “unrelentingly disrupted by difference and hybridity,” (Cucarella-Ramon 83). Or in other words, Cucarella-Ramon puts Harlem Duet and Desdemona in conversation with Othello to offer a modern look at race in Othello, and more importantly offer a way for African Americans and African Canadians a way to read Othello and be able to place themselves in the story. They also bring the role of women to the forefront to render a feminist and democratic definition of the black female self. Cucarella-Ramon thinks that these readings can offer a look into the black identity in North America. 

• Priscilla Adams 

“You Be Othello: Interrogating Identification in the Classroom.”

 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

"Shakespeare’s Blush, or 'the Animal' in Othello"

Swarbrick, Steven. “Shakespeare’s Blush, or ‘the Animal’ in Othello.” Exemplaria, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 70–85., doi:10.1080/10412573.2016.1115624. 

In the article by Steven Swarbrick for Exemplaria, Swarbrick argues that the notions of animality and shame are inextricably connected in Shakespeare’s Othello. According to Swarbrick, animaliy is the “key optic through which the play visualizes and dehumanizes its black protagonist”, as evidenced through all of the instances in the play in which Othello is compared to animals like a black ram, a beast with two backs, a Barbary horse, and more. The key goals in this article are to compel us to rethink early modern categories of race in connection with “human” vs “animal”, and to prove that humanization cannot be countered with a simple return to the human. A key part of the argument is about an animal’s inability to blush. The blush is what many consider to be what distinguishes humans from animals, in that not only can we blush, but we can feel shame at nakedness, whereas animals cannot. Because black skin was seen at this time to be unable to blush, people with black skin, like Othello, were deemed animalistic. But while many would draw distinctions between Iago and Othello on this point, Swarbrick contends that Iago himself has a compulsion to hide his feelings and his own blush, thus blurring the lines between animal and human. 

The majority of the article, then, focuses on the line “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago”. Using this line, Swarbrick argues that “Iago is black, even though he is not in blackface. Similarly, Othello is white, both because of and despite the fact that he is in blackface” (Swarbrick). Iago is the Moor, while Othello, the character often compared to an animal, is not the Moor that the audience would expect. Ultimately, then, what Swarbrick attempts to prove in this article is that while many scholars believe that animality asserts the racial difference between the characters, the opposite is true, and that when animals enter the scene, racial difference becomes undone. 

-- Wes Wingert

“The Other Interracial Marriage in Othello”

Boyer, Arlynda. “The Other Interracial Marriage in Othello.” Shakespeare, vol. 11, no. 2, 2015, pp. 178-200, doi: 10.1080/17450918.2013.833977

In “The Other Interracial Marriage in Othello,” Arlynda Boyer argues that Emilia should be cast as a black woman, saying, “Emilia could be racially different from Iago, and ... understanding her as such serves to illuminate the play for audiences in the here and now” (179). She begins by considering whether original productions of the play cast Emilia as a black or white woman—or both, depending on the context of the audience—reminding readers that the concept of “race” as we know it today came years after Othello’s origin, and those later perceptions shouldn’t cause us to “whitewash” Shakespeare’s characters or how they were depicted on stage during Shakespeare’s time. Boyer argues that Emilia could be black because the script doesn’t define her ethnicity, and there also may have been an audience for a black Emilia: “I am arguing an Emilia who can be either African or Venetian, precisely because she is undefined, whose potential Africanness may have been a staging experiment or an alteration specifically for court performance, and whose flexibility offers us options as it may have offered the King’s Men options” (184). At the same time, Boyer argues that contemporary productions of Othello should cast Emilia as a black woman, as doing so would “[force] audiences to notice complicated racial and gender hierarchies that normally go unquestioned” (181), especially considering the fact that there would be two interracial couples in the play: a black man/white woman and a white man/black woman. In contemporary productions, being purposeful about casting Emilia as a black woman could then give audiences the opportunity to “critique and interrogate [their] shared past [of colonialism]” (181). Thus, a black Emilia would serve as a powerful tool for cultural criticism.

Jenny Jadin

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In “The Other Interracial Marriage in Othello” Boyer argues and describe the character of Emilia, and how she can be both read and cast as a black woman. Boyer asks his audiences to  consider the interpretive and performative possibilities in such a move and states that “however, for these first racial uses of “white” to be intelligible to their hearers, the word must already have undergone a slippage in meaning from its earlier status as a gender, moral, and class marker – that is, it must have been made available for newer alternate meanings,” (190). The essay then goes into a thought experiment and in that performance, Emilia gives us possibly the first depictions of an African woman on the English stage. And this offers an exploration of the racial and gender dynamics in not one, but two interracial marriages. With two different interracial, the article focuses on the dynamics of both marriages and how gender and race can have a large effect on the way people are portrayed.

- Priscilla Nicole Adams

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    In this essay, Boyer argues that in Shakespeare’s Othello, Emilia is a character written with no defined race and because of this, when read or played as a person of color, the dynamics of the play shift considerably. Boyer argues that when Emilia is read or played as a woman of color it may “mask Iago’s villainy from the other characters” (181). Included in this mask would also be Othello’s blind trust of Iago, especially in areas of marriage. Boyer relies on omission of the text to prove her point: Emilia is the only female in the play not referred to as “fair.” Additionally, Boyer believes that Emilia and Iago’s relationship is meant to reflect Desdemona and Othello’s and to do this fully, one partner must not be Venetian. Boyer argues that Iago compares the sin Desdemona has committed to the same one he has committed (2.1.92); this means to imply that they have both married outside of their race. Finally, Boyer cites the use of the word “filth” as a racial slur. She notes that many critics take the use of “filth” (when Emilia says it to Othello, 5.2.164) to be racially motivated. A few lines later, Iago refers to Emilia in the same way. Boyer acknowledges that her argument is circumstantial; she relies heavily on omission of a defined race for Emilia. She does provide some information in response to possible rebuttals from critics. To those who would say that Iago does not approve of Desdemona’s relationship with Othello, he would never be married to a woman of color Boyer points out that there have been well-known racists (i.e. Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond) who have had relationships with women of color.  

-Lauren Olson