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Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms

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Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms KYLE G RADY If progressive people, most of whom were white, could so blindly reproduce a version of the status quo and not “see” it, the thought of how racial politics would be played out “outside” this arena was horrifying. — bell hooks1 NWRITINGO THELLO, SHAKESPEARE PROFOUNDLY COMPLICATES ITS I OSTENSIBLE SOURCE, CINTHIO’ S G LI H ECATOMMITHI.This complex- ity is crafted through various additions and, as Coleridge famously observed, key subtractions.2 Removing Iago’s obvious motives, for example, develops a more mercurial and complicated villain, while also amplifying the senselessness of the final tragedy. In Cinthio’s tale, there is a satisfying denouement in which we learn that “all these events were told” by one “who knew the facts.”3 Shakespeare replaces this certitude with loose ends. Iago, the key to better grasping the play’s outcome, is resolutely uncommunicative once implicated, telling his accusers “What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.”4 And, in what reads as a final longing for the clarity denied to the play, Othello voices an intractable charge: “Speak of me as I am” (5.2.351). As the drama’s lively critical afterlife demonstrates, there is a three-dimension- ality to Othello that thwarts attempts to fully meet this request. For their insight, I am sincerely grateful to the participants of the 2015 Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Early Modern Race / Ethnic / Diaspora Studies,” especially the seminar leaders, Kim F. Hall and Peter Erickson. Many thanks are also due to Michael Schoenfeldt and Valerie Traub for their generous feedback on this essay. 1 bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Cultural Studies,ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 338–46, esp. 345. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously annotated a copy of Othello from which he lectured. There, he describes Iago’s shifting, inadequate rationale for undoing Othello as “the motive- hunting of motiveless Malignity.” See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature II, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), 315. 3 Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cintho, “From Gli Hecatommithi,” in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia UP, 1973), 252. 4 Othello, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 5.2.351. Unless otherwise noted, further quotations from Shakespeare are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically. OTHELLO, COLIN POWELL, POST-RACIAL ANACHRONISMS 69 Because the play engages ethnic difference with similar complexity, scholars confront the arduous task of articulating the gravity of Othello’s blackness. We are required to “speak of ” racism as it is in the text, despite the play’s intriguing indi- rectness about the matter. Othello is derided in the street for his blackness, yet he enjoys a relatively privileged life. He is held to prescriptive—albeit conflicting— ethnically based presumptions, but it is his nobility that predominates in descrip- tions of him.5 His phenotype is an inextricable facet of his character, but so are his religion and his occupation.6 As much as the text debases Othello along ethnic lines, it also assesses him more positively through alternative criteria.7 In this essay, I demonstrate that while Othello’s equivocal treatment offers some scholars avenues through which they see the play’s racism contested, this type of ambiguity is actually characteristic of regimes of racial intolerance. A pervasive misconception that racialism is unambiguous often precludes an investigation of those ubiquitous, less overt systems of racism that intersect with ancillary social mechanisms and ostensibly mitigating factors. With regard to Othello, this perspective encourages the notion that ostensibly mitigating fac- tors, such as Othello’s prominent occupation, and ancillary social mechanisms, like the text’s interest in religious identity, contravene rather than converge with the play’s racialism. This essay attempts to wrest the play from readings that replicate this misconception. Whereas in the contemporary moment this notion takes the form of post-racialism, this trend in early modern scholarship could be said to employ a pre-racial orientation. While we have moved away from the full exculpatory frameworks of the recent past, the field has incorporated new models through which to selectively attribute and thus downplay the text’s 5 According to Desdemona, Othello is “true of mind, and made of no such baseness / As jeal- ous creatures are” (3.4.25–26) because “the sun where he was born / Drew all such humours from him” (ll. 28–29), yet Iago appears convinced that Othello embodies a number of sordid race-based qualities, including libidinousness and inconstancy. The ensign evokes the stereotype of the hyper-sexual black male when he suspects the “lusty Moor” (2.3.282) of having sex with Emilia, and he further impugns Othello along racial lines when convincing Roderigo of the fragility of the Moor’s marriage, claiming that “These Moors are changeable in their / wills” (1.3.339–40). Despite these inconsistent preconceptions, we quickly come to know Othello as “our noble and valiant general” (2.2.1–2) and “the noble Moor” (2.3.122). 6 Emma Smith indicates the way in which religion is an inextricable yet unresolvable facet of the Moor’s characterization, contending that Othello is “paradoxical, a divided or in-between figure” with respect to his faith. She points out that “a dominant meaning of ‘Moor’ was ‘Muslim,’” while also noting that “many productions have assumed that the Othello who bids Desdemona pray before her murder and who swears ‘by heaven’ more frequently than all the other characters in the play put together is a convert to Christianity.” See Emma Smith, William Shakespeare, “Othello” (Hordon, UK: Northcote House, 2005), 37–38. 7 This calls to mind Virginia Mason Vaughan’s response to Othello: “I think this play is racist, and I think it is not.” See Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Othello”: A Contextual History (Cam- bridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 70. 70 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY racism.8 As with many post-racial perspectives, this type of scholarship pro- ceeds with the intention of producing conscientious work on race, appearing in step with many antiracist investigations of the text. To delineate how this ori- entation operates in approaches to Othello, I will compare it to the treatment of former U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a contemporary figure whose nar- rative also encourages doubts about the operation of comprehensive racism. And indeed, since Shakespeare’s play provides a nuanced rendering of ethnic difference, it is particularly susceptible to such readings. Consider the bluntness of Cinthio’s Ensign on the matter of race. When the Moorish Commander entreats him for an honest answer concerning Disdemona’s affections, the Ensign’s fabrication rings simple: “The woman has come to dislike your black- ness.”9 The revelation, which strikes “the Moor’s heart to its core,” employs an ostensibly unambiguous prejudice about skin color.10 Compare this moment to its Shakespeare analog, where Iago’s words embed the phenotypic concern within a constellation of factors: to be bold with you, Not to affect many proposèd matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends. Foh, one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural! (3.3.233–38) Racial prejudice is not an isolated concern here, given the inclusion of “degree” and “clime.” Instead, Iago intersperses notions of skin color and humoral tenets with vague notions of status.11 Elsewhere in the play, perhaps most infamously through Iago’s description of Othello as “an old black ram” (1.1.88), age provides another complicating factor to Shakespeare’s characterization of the Moor. 8 Positions like those of Martin Orkin, who asserts that Othello works to “oppose racism,” have been thoroughly refuted. Michael Neill astutely critiques Orkin’s position in his introduc- tion to the Oxford edition of Othello. See Martin Orkin, “Othello and the ‘Plain Face’ of Racism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38.2 (1987): 166–88, esp. 188; and Michael Neill, introduction to Othello (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 120. 9 Cintho, “From Gli Hecatommithi,” 245. 10 Cintho, “From Gli Hecatommithi,” 245. 11 The dual relevance of the term “complexion” to early modern humoral ideologies and early modern notions of skin color is worth noting here, as it presents an example of racialism’s oper- ation alongside concerns that often appear distinct from issues of race. An overemphasis on humoral tenets runs the risk of overshadowing as opposed to elucidating the prejudicial evoca- tion of skin color. Indeed, insomuch as Morocco’s use of the term in The Merchant of Venice engages with humoral discourse, it concurrently identifies a salient prejudice concerning dark skin. He entreats Portia, “Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadowed livery of the burnished sun” (2.1.1–2). OTHELLO, COLIN POWELL, POST-RACIAL ANACHRONISMS 71 To elucidate this multileveled approach to Othello’s identity, critics often contrast the play’s treatment of Othello with subsequent racial ideologies. In these comparisons, later ideologies of race
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