ABSTRACT
Verdi composed Otello at a time when Italians were subjected to a racist stereotype that connected them and Africans with male sexual jealousy; this was also the time when the German composer Richard Wagner was challenging Italian operatic traditions. Through unusual but apt musical strategies, Verdi subverted the racist stereotype and showed composers ways of modernising Italian opera without imitating German models. At the same time, the opera simplifies Shakespeare’s treatment of patriarchy. While Otello’s libretto shows some influence of the racist readings then popular in Europe, Verdi’s subversion of the racist stereotype ties in with his anticolonial politics, while his quotation of a striking passage from Otello in his last opera Falstaff reminds audiences of the constructedness of racial stereotypes. As such, critical approaches that analyse Otello only in terms of Italy as a European state with colonial ambitions miss out on the anti-racist and anticolonial politics that makes Otello unique among nineteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello.
