ABSTRACT
With a relentless plot that hurtles to a catastrophic climax, Othello lends itself to deterministic explanations. In one rich vein of the play’s reception history, orthodox psychoanalytic criticism presents an oedipal story of the idealization and disillusionment of the “male sexual imagination”1 in which Othello’s race becomes little more than a contingent aggravating circumstance. In a critical counter narrative, the new historicism has generated an abundance of descriptions of early modern English stereotypes of Moors and Africans in which race functions as the defi nitive marker of character and hence as the principal agent of a predictable failure of erotic possibility. While new historicist studies tend to grant the play less of a sense of refl exive critique than did G. K. Hunter in his 1978 essay “Othello and Colour Prejudice,”2 these studies have not always agreed on the salient points of Tudor/Stuart racial mythology that bear on Othello. Ania Loomba points to two essays that appeared in Representations within a year of each other that “suggest absolutely divergent valencies for Islam in early modern England”; where Eric Griffi n fi nds that Islam is the “ally of Protestant England, Hispanic Roman Catholicism was the Other,” Julia Lupton contends that “Islam and the Turks are the real adversary” of Christian Europe.3 Although Griffi n and Lupton come to diff erent conclusions about the precise form of English xenophobia for which Othello serves as a symptom, they share the new historicist premise that our modern critical task is to discover and to defi ne the diff erences between the incipient racism of early modern Europe and the later conventions of scientifi c racism.
