2 - Race and Othello

Summary

Why does Othello, in that final speech, shift the question of racial otherness into the multifarious exoticism of Aleppo, the ‘turbaned Turk’, ‘Arabian trees’, ‘base Indian’ (5.2.356–62) – or, as some texts modernize the Folio's ‘Iudean’, ‘Judean’ – all the while ignoring the identity of ‘Moor’ with which the play labels him from its title onwards? Shifting ideas of racial difference are a crucial – and problematic – aspect of the play and of its reception. When American literature professor Emily Bartels notes that her students, on reading Othello, always want to talk about race, she implies that this ‘so often tend[s] to simplify the story’. Rather it seems to me to complicate it in ways that force us to acknowledge similarities and differences between our own perspectives and those of early modern audiences, which bring us up against notions of prejudice that cannot be comfortably consigned to history, and that implicate us in the racially configured discourses out of which the play was written and in which it has continued to be read and performed. Far from simplifying Othello and Othello, questions of race engage us in complex narratives of belonging and alienation. Othello has shaped racial understanding in a range of ways unthinkable to Shakespeare and his original audiences: as the novelist Ben Okri has observed, if it ‘is not a play about race, then its history has made it one’. Martin Wine laments the way in which ‘modernity, alas, thrusts itself willy-nilly upon the play’; Julie Hankey describes the ‘patina of apparent topicality’ the play has acquired. These, too, seem to underestimate the subtlety, the inevitability and the challenge of these forms of topicality, as perhaps the dominant claim Othello has on our twenty-first-century attention. When Janet Suzman produced the play in the Market Theatre of Johannesburg during apartheid, she and John Kani, who played Othello, were ‘at last, fired up after ten frustrating years of keeping a constant vigil for the play that might speak not just to both of us as actors but to our anguished country’; when the African-American actor Paul Robeson took on the role, he observed that Othello ‘in the Venice of that time was in practically the same position as a coloured man in America today’: both comments attest to the ongoing fact of the play's unsettling relevance.