On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 11:53 AM, Andrew Stewart wrote: > > > Iago opens OTHELLO with a jaw-droppingly racist rant that has little > variation from what Dixiecrats said about inter-ethnic marriage: > > >> 'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on >> your gown; >> Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul; >> Even now, now, very now, an old black ram >> Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise; >> Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, >> Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you : >> Arise, I say. -Act I Scene I >> > > > Right there you have Iago equating a Black man with a farm animal, a ram > or male Sheep. That’s not very different from what we get from Breitbart > today. >
Andrew Stewart's information re indenture and chattel slavery in the broader European picture seems terrifically apposite and worth studying in detail. With all due respect, however, this particular passage seems to reflect the historian's "easter-egg hunt," hermetic, or tin-eared approach to the interpretation of literary texts, which perhaps ill serves the main thrust of Stewart's post. Iago equates not only Othello but Desdemona herself with a farm animal--a white ewe. Indeed, by using this metaphor, Iago includes her father, Brabantio, himself in the category of farm animals, since only a ram can beget a ewe, although it may be that he is only meant to represent the man who owns the woman and the animals. In fact, Iago equates Iago's blackness with that of the Devil and that is what lends force to the comparison. Equations of the color black to the Devil occur elsewhere in Shakespeare. eg "the Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon" in MacBeth. What is missing in Shakespeare's discourse is any developed conception of "white people"--in its fully developed racist ideological form, a product of the United States and one that cannot be understood in the absence of fully developed US black chattel slavery and its racist aftermath following the civil war. There is a play back and forth on Othello's color that has nothing immediately to do with the particular social pathology on display in Breitbart and currently vying for dictatorial power in the US. "Renaissance racism" is another topic, but what this passage actually conveys is an aspect of medieval christian iconography that no doubt eventually found its way into the iconography of the Ku Klux clan, but did so through a process of adaptation and repurposing. To see it full-fledged in this speech is like eg seeing the romano-hellenistic architectural motifs of Petra as proof that the Nabateans were greco-roman, which--except for certain aspects of their architecture--they were not. So, at most proto-racism. Any other conclusion from this passage is IMO circular reasoning that begs the question. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#1875): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1875 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/77034114/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
