The Beast With Two Backs Race And Racism In Shakespeare S Othello

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: This term paper seeks to dislocate traces of racism within the characters of Iago, Othello, and Desdemona in Shakespeare's "Othello". By scrutinizing both overt and covert forms of xenophobia, it tries to explain how and why the play came to its tragic ending. In 1994, Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography that "no one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion" and that, consequently, "people must learn to hate". By itself, this is a simple statement but it is also egregious in the way it makes us understand. There is nothing it could not explain, no dispute it could not illuminate. And even though Mr. Mandela had originally formulated his statement with regard to Apartheid, it fits extraordinarily well to racism in Shakespeare’s "Othello". Judging from Michael Neill’s investigations into the subject of notions of human difference in early modern societies, 16th century Venice had a considerably open attitude towards foreigners of any kind, with a great deal of cultural exchange taking place between people of every colour and every religion. By the beginning of the 17th century, however, this started to change: as the number of encounters with foreign cultures increased, "color emerg[ed] as the most important criterion for defining otherness" (Neill). As Mandela would have put it, Venetians started to learn hating others in behalf of their skin colour. And precisely this kind of development is illustrated in Othello: the Moor, who is actually a prime example for successful integration, has to endure an increasing degree of enmities and discriminations as racist sentiments begin to emerge in Venetian society — sentiments even Othello himself cannot resist.

A discussion of inter-racial sexual relations in Anglo-American literature from the English Renaissance to today.

This study explores more recent adaptations published in the last decade whereby women—either authors or their characters—talk back to Shakespeare in a variety of new ways. "Talking back to Shakespeare", a term common in intertextual discourse, is not a new phenomenon, particularly in literature. For centuries, women writers—novelists, playwrights, and poets—have responded to Shakespeare with inventive and often transgressive retellings of his work. Thus far, feminist scholarship has examined creative responses to Shakespeare by women writers through the late twentieth century. This book brings together the "then" of Shakespeare with the "now" of contemporary literature by examining how many of his plays have cultural currency in the present day. Adoption and surrogate childrearing; gender fluidity; global pandemics; imprisonment and criminal justice; the intersection of misogyny and racism—these are all pressing social and political concerns, but they are also issues that are central to Shakespeare’s plays and the early modern period. By approaching material with a fresh interdisciplinary perspective, Women Talk Back to Shakespeare is an excellent tool for both scholars and students concerned with adaptation, women and gender, and intertextuality of Shakespeare’s plays.

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

Reviews Shakespeare's view of masculinity through The Tempest, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and others.

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, LMU Munich, language: English, abstract: This paper is structured into two parts – in the first part about race I first want to talk about some theories about Othello’s race, Elizabethan stereotypes about Moors and what might have been reasons for making Othello, the Moor of Venice. In the second part I am going to focus on the part religion plays in Othello, the opposition of Christianity against Islam, the influence religion, the bible and the other character’s religious affiliations play in Othello and of course Othello’s own religious denomination.

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Cambridge (English ), course: Supervision: Fitzwilliam Collge: Shakespeare, language: English, abstract: Shakespeare’s Othello has caught people’s attention for more than four hundred years now. This is may be true for many other Shakespearean plays as well, but Othello was exceptionally popular at its time of origin and is not less so today. Reasons for this are probably manifold, but the notions of gender, sexuality, status and race which are still very current issues might contribute to this timeless and universal appreciation. The latter is at the focus of this essay.

Presents current scholarship on race and racism in Shakespeare's works. The Handbook offers an overview of approaches used in early modern critical race studies through fresh readings of the plays; an exploration of new methodologies and archives; and sustained engagement with race in contemporary performance, adaptation, and activism.