Othello, etc. (was Re: Invention of the white race)

[Kenneth Mostern]

Othello need not be understand as either/or in regard to racial ideology, but rather a text that, consciously or not, stands at an early moment in the development of racial ideology and therefore shows a certain ambivalence of position.  There is no question that Iago, in describing what's wrong with Othello, invokes stereotypes that will shortly become hegemonic racial constructions.  So if I agree that the play's conclusion does not support the claim that Shakespeare blames the whole thing on interracial marriage, on the other hand it does suggest a second order problem - if blacks aspire to the European nobility, the underlings will get restless.  In other words, it (not atypically in Shakespeare) suggests a battle between proper (since Shakespeare shapes plays around the concerns of the nobility) class hierarchies and improper alternative hierarchies, like that of race, which the subalterns (in the pretheoretical sense-Iago is literally subaltern to Othello) might propose.

The nobility have a much greater stake in class "blood" than race "blood".  The rising English bourgeoisie have a reverse stake.  I'm no Renaissance scholar, but it strikes me that seeing this distinction would be useful in the reading of lots of Renaissance work.  For example, in recent theory I keep reading discussions of Behn's Oroonko that ignore this.

Kenneth Mostern
Department of English
University of Tennessee

"Talent is perhaps nothing more than successfully sublimated rage."

	Theodor Adorno

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