SHAKESPEARE's Othello: The Question of Race
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- Опубликовано: 14 окт 2024
- This episode will be focused mainly on how Othello comes to understand himself as Black. This takes place only when he gets to Cyprus, and due to Iago’s machinations he begins to compare himself negatively to your Venetians. The fact of his blackness is thus a negotiated fact in his own mind that comes to be joined to his sense of affronted masculinity and thus to convert him into a babbling beast.
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I am writing a paper and this helped a lot, great vid!
Wonderful! Today I work on African Literature no doubt, and have faced many issues related to my area of work. People are quite amazed to know that someone can really study Literature by the "blacks"! The racism I face till date isn't something new for me! When I was in Standard VI, we were asked to read Shakespeare's plays. So our students went to the shelf where books by Shakespeare were kept! Being a backbencher, I reached the shelf quite late, and the good students had already taken the other books, only a few copies of OTHELLO and some others were left
Having not much choice, I took OTHELLO. But when I went to the Librarian's counter to get it signed, she said with a disgust in her face, "Othello?? Kaalo (black)"! At that point of time I really didn't understand why was a person who is black, his story was not something worth reading! But your video today, took me back to my school days, since which I have seen how racist people are as far as Othello is concerned. Thank you very much for this wonderful topic .
Thanks, Kalapi. I am sorry to hear of the myopic response of your school librarian. At least now you know better. But these things still happen even today.
Professor are you planning on doing a postcolonial analysis of Othello?
Othello is a great example of what the white gaze does to a man's psyche also the insecurity and projection of the White inferiority complex.
Blown away. Super relevant. Also for raising a black child in a white-majority world marking race still along tropes we see in Othello. Thank you.
I am glad you liked it. I have of course only just scratched the surface from a Postcolonial perspective. There is much more to be said.
Great reading. The crux, perhaps, is that while most of his interlocutors are Venetians (or natives/citizens of some named lands) Othello is Black, a place-indifferent structure of being that precedes him as you demonstrated. Anthropophagi? I know such many lands that if I begin to name them, I will not be able to return "home" to Nigeria! Great lecture, prof.
Thanks, Leke. Othello offers several parables about race relations even in our modern times. Will stay on this theme with the episode on Fanon next week.
@@CriticReadingWriting Nice timing. My postcolonial seminar is taking on Fanon during the first week in October. We'll definitely watch that episode.
Fascinating!
Thanks, Madam President!
I have to listen to this again, as the key question for me is: while we think of Othello in terms of race, did Shakespeare, and in the story, how important was blackness to Othello and the Venetians other than that he was an outsider from another civilization? There are interpretations of Othello which see his outsiderness differently than the question of blackness.
Hi Ralph, I think it is almost impossible to separate Othello from the question of his blackness, and I am not aware that anyone has written on it otherwise. His outsiderness is of course crucial to his identity, but this manifests itself explicitly only at the very end. But from the beginning he is not considered an outsider, at least not by the Venetian Senate, but a very important military functionary.
My memory is not very good: what did CLR James say about Othello? Otherwise, I saw a play about Othello wherein all the actors argue with one another about their relationships with one another as well as the meaning of Othello, with some surprising results, when at the end a black actor argues with his black girlfriend about being made to feel inferior because he comes from a lower social class. I've seen OTHELLO itself only twice, the last time a couple years ago when the black woman I was with rolled her eyes at the mention of Othello's blackness, but I can't remember anything else.
Great lecture Prof. thank you. ""Toxic masculinity""
Thanks, Gladys.
Man hater.
Thank you for fighting back for us, especially black artists in this evil country!