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

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Carrol write:
>Two works which strongly suggest the late 18th century for the origin of
>*modern* racism (at least in the U.S.) are Stephanie Coontz, *The Social
>Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600-1900* (Verso,
>1988) and Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States
>of America," NLR 181 (May/June 1990). Also, Volume I of *Black Athena*
>gives a good deal of evidence that anti-semitism only became racialist in
>the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Finally, Thomas Laqueur, *Making
>Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud* (Harvard, 1992) accumulates
>evidence (Coontz offers similar evidence) that the rationale for male
>supremacy only came to be biologically grounded in the 19th century.
>
>Jan Carew in articles in *Race and Class* which I can't put my fingers on
>just now argues for a 16th century origin in the Spanish invasion of the
>new world. M.I. Finley in *Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology* argues
>that ancient slavery was also rationalized by racism.
>
> Some sort of spontaneous "chauvinism," initial fear or dislike of the
>"different," may have some sort of transhistorical basis, but that is
>irrelevant to modern racism. In any case, *Othello* is certainly *not*
>evidence for anything remotely resembling U.S. racism of the 19th century,
>for only Desdemona's father is strongly offended by the marriage, and even
>in his ravings there is nothing remotely resembling the core of racialist
>ideology as it developed in the 19th century: the horror of miscegenation.
>That requires a "scientific" basis. And of course the aggressive
>anti-semitism of the *Merchant of Venice* is equally aggressively
>*non-racialist*: the final punishment of Shylock is that he must allow his
>daughter to marry (and become) a Christian. Could you imagine a
>nineteenth-century play in which a black villain was punished by having to
>allow his daughter to marry an aristocratic white man and become the
>mother of his children?

I certainly agree that what we see in _Othello_, _The Merchant of Venice_,
etc. is not the same as modern racism that is rooted in the need for
biological justification of inequality in the face of bourgeois revolutions
and their ideology of political equality. However, I think that premodern
notions of barbarism, the opposition betwen Christendom and the infidels
(e.g. the Turks and the Jews), and so on must have provided ideological
resources and cognitive mapping frameworks onto which 'science' of the body
can map itself.

Yoshie