Othello

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Othello
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Celebrity, Race, Miscegenation, and Murder

• O.J. O-thello

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What is the meaning of race?
Is Obama black?
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What is the meaning of race?

• The concept of race signifies the grouping of
  individual humans by some set of perceived
  physical characteristics, often called
  phenotypes, which are thought to be inherited
  through some blood-borne factor. Which specific
  set of perceived, shared physical characteristics
  constitute a race varies historically,
  geographically, socially, and politically.
  Indeed, there is no biological or genetic
  foundation for the grouping of individual humans
  into a racial group. Instead, humans themselves
  choose (consciously or unconsciously) which
  physical characteristics constitute a racial
  group. Consequently, racial groups are presently
  thought to be social constructions, or a category
  created not by biological nature but by human
  invention Race, The Stanford Encyclopedia of
  Philosophy.

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What is the meaning of race?

• Historically, race has been informed by
  biological essentialism i.e., a blood or
  genetic basis to racial categories that produces
  physical characteristics or phenotypes.
• Largely discredited, replaced by ethnicity, to
  mean modes of self-identification in communities
  organized heterogeneously and discontinuously by
  geography, language and culture, and whose
  heterogeneity naturally counters the homogeneity
  of such concepts as race.
• Discrete racial groupings lead to, presuppose
  ethnographic assumptions equivalencies between
  physical phenotypes and classes of
  characteristics.

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What is the meaning of race?

• Racial groupings arguably always hierarchized
  discrete boundaries are used to justify political
  ends, e.g., Apartheid.
• Racism still pervasive Racism attempts to
  reduce members of social groups to their racial
  features, drawing on a complex history of racial
  stereotypes to do so (Identity Politics,
  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
• Race generally thought to have emerged in early
  modern period, during first colonial encounters
  becomes justification for slave trade
  concretized in late seventeenth century, Francois
  Berniers 1684 A New Division of the Earth.
• In the early modern period, equivalencies between
  physical and behavioural characteristics emerge,
  but are fluid, not fixed literature, among other
  forms of writing, participates in ethnographic
  (ethnos grapheme, writing) constructions.

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Is Othello a racialized character?

• In other words, does Othello as a literary
  construction serve to construct race in terms of
  equivalencies between physical phenotypes and
  ethnographic characteristics? Or does the play
  undermine or problematize emergent constructions
  of race?
• Are the plays race relations hierarchized?
  What social or political goals do they justify?
• Compare with Aaron from Titus Andronicus and
  Morocco from The Merchant of Venice can we map a
  genealogy of Shakespeares writing, from c. 1592
  to c. 1602?
• How are English perceptions of race determined by
  their representation in the drama?

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Genealogy of the Moor

• Term originally derives from ancient Mauretania.
• In Elizabethan England, use reflects English
  misperceptions about Moors geographically term
  was applied indiscriminately to peoples from
  various geographic regions and ethnicities.
• Terms use reflected fluidity of English
  perceptions of and attitudes to non-Europeans.
• Terms use also signaled stereotypes about
  appearance, behavior and religion.

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Genealogy of the Moor

• Some of these stereotypes descend from
  anti-Islamic literature (mostly pamphlets and
  tracts) written about and after the Crusades.
• Also influenced by increased encounter with
  non-Europeans through trading and traffic in the
  Mediterranean emergent slave trade.
• The stage Moor in England popularized by George
  Peeles The Battle of Alcazar (printed 1594).
• Literary Moors not determined by fixed notions of
  race, but use of term would serve to construct
  race in terms of equivalencies, for example,
  between blackness and barbarism.

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Sources

• Play possibly influenced by contemporary travel
  literature, including Richard Hakluyts Principal
  Navigations (expanded in 1599 to include sections
  on Africa) and Leo Africnauss 1600 A
  Geographical Historie of Africa.
• Dates of these works arguably account for
  difference between Aaron and Othello.
• Ania Loomba argues that religion and skin colour
  intersect in the development of race as a
  concept while Aarons depravity is associated
  with his skin colour and, therefore, with uses of
  the term Moor that signify his African blackness,
  Othello, although the play never comments on his
  religion, cannot be understood without
  understanding attitudes to Turks and Muslims
  (Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism 46).

Woodcut illustration from Sebastian Munsters
Cosmographia (c. 1544?) showing a cyclops,
Siamese twins, blemmyea, among others.
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Sources

• Shakespeares Moor character in Othello adopted
  from source in Giraldi Cinthios Hecatommithi a
  collection of 100 moral novelle or tales French
  translation.
• Story of the Moor and Disdemona occurs in third
  decade, seventh novella grouped in decade with
  tales of marital infidelity and sexual jealousy.
• Numerous differences between Cinthio and
  Shakespeare.
• What is the moral of Cinthios story? How is the
  moral adapted by or adopted into Shakespeares
  version?
• Disdemona says to Ensigns wife, I know not
  what to say of the Moor he used to be all love
  towards me but within these few days he has
  become another man and much I fear that I shall
  prove a warning to young girls not to marry
  against the wishes of their parents, and that the
  Italian ladies may learn from me not to wed a man
  who nature and habitude of life estrange from
  us.

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Venice in the early modern period

• Lord Byron would write later in 1817 that the
  state of morality in Venice was much the same as
  it was in the Doges time (the setting of the
  play) a woman is virtuous (according to the
  code) who limits herself to her husband and one
  lover those who have two, three, or more, are a
  little wild but only those who are
  indiscriminately diffuse are considered as
  overstepping the modesty of marriage (from the
  Arden edition Introduction, p. 9).

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Othello in the Mediterranean

• Increased commercial exchange between England and
  Barbary states.
• Travel narratives, but also captivity narratives
  many English enslaved in North Africa.
• Fetish of foreign exotica curiosity or wonder
  cabinets.
• Venice and Cyprus as geographical settings.

First Moorish Ambassador to England, 1600.