Othello, like the few other Shakespearean plays that address the specter of race, remains controversial in scholarly analysis. The play and its protagonist (or, if Iago is interpreted as protagonist, its namesake) have both been hailed as progressive and attacked as problematic. Shakespeare’s efforts in the play have been celebrated by some critics and repudiated by others; Mika Nyoni goes so far as to describe Shakespeare as a writer who may have “influenced or helped to perpetuate racism and religious bigotry which was evident in The Slave Trade, Colonialism, and the persecution of Jews in Germany.”¹ Although many critics of the play have identified the site of contestation as either the racism of Iago or the violence of Othello, few have focused on the character Othello himself. Ultimately, the way that Shakespeare falsely inhabits the Black psyche in his representation of Othello is foreign and debilitating. By othering Othello from his very self, Shakespeare presents to us an (anti-Black) Black character that is more of a caricature that a tragic hero.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s inadequate portrayal of the Black character at the center of the play, Othello is useful as a window onto perceptions of race in England in the early modern period. The play features a cast with a variety of racial outlooks, ranging from outright racists (like Iago) to those who are more sympathetic (like the Duke of Venice) to those who are the most accepting of Blackness (Desdemona, and presumably, Othello). This range is perhaps a reflection of some of the attitudes prevalent in Shakespeare’s time, and while the views of these fictional characters cannot be taken as reflective of Shakespeare’s own views, it is clear that they are rooted in reality. Othello is an Other in every way, and one who is defined in the eyes of almost every character, including himself, by his Otherness. The prefix of “Moor” or “black” is often attached to his name, which in and of itself is never explained (was Othello really the name that he was born with in North Africa?). Othello does not have a name or a nation when he is “the Moor” (more than fifty times), “the dull Moor,” “the cruel Moor,” or even “the noble Moor.”² Of course, Iago showcases the potential of early-modern racists in a way that far surpasses Othering; all of the inventive slurs aside, he most shockingly compares Othello to a horse, suggesting that Desdemona’s relationship with a black man would be bestiality.³ However, Iago’s antiblackness is not problematic, especially seeing that he is the villain of the play. It is the anti-Blackness that the supposed hero exhibits toward himself (vis-a-vis Shakespeare’s imagining of a Black man) that is far more concerning.

There is something disturbing in the way that Othello talks about himself—or more accurately, the way that Shakespeare imagines Othello would talk about himself. It is clear, especially by the end of the play, that his Blackness is only ever a site for insecurity and emasculation. In act 3, scene 3, Othello reflects on his skin color sadly: “Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have.”⁴ The way Othello objectively announces his blackness feels stiff and unnatural (Haply, for I am black!). Despite his status as a military general and his clear capacity for anger and resistance, Othello suspiciously never seems to question or resist racism: The effect renders him sympathetic to the white viewer at the cost of his very Blackness. (Othello reminds me of pandering, sympathetic “Mammy” figures in American cinema.) In the same conversation with Iago, he even bizarrely refers to himself as a slave: “O, that the slave had forty thousand lives.”⁵ Most offensively, when lamenting Desdemona to Iago, Othello says: “Her name, that was as fresh/ As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black/ As mine own face.”⁶ That a Black person would compare their own blackness to physical dirt is only as comical as it is offensive. When someone lives their whole life as a Black person, they psychologically understand the color of their own skin, and would never even think to think of themselves as “begrimed.” Just as a white character would not ever describe themselves as raw or undercooked, a black character would not describe themselves as dirty or covered in soot. However, historically, white or lighter-skinned people have seen black skin as dirty, sometimes due to a direct misunderstanding of what Black skin is. In the 1986 Iranian film Bashu, The Little Stranger, light skinned Iranians try to “wash” the black off the film’s protagonist, an Afro-Iranian from the country’s more secluded south.

Othello’s self-hatred and anti-Blackness not only feels ontologically inaccurate, but historically inaccurate as well. While it is obvious that a white man would make a big deal out of a North African Moor’s Blackness, it does not make sense that a North African Moor would primarily identify with the construct of “race” as opposed to that of homeland, tribe, religion, or other ethnic configuration. (Even today, North Africans will much sooner identify with nationality or religion rather than race; part of this is because many see themselves as Arab rather than Black.) To me, Othello reads exactly like a white man’s envisioning of a Black man; he is oddly obsessed with the aspects of himself that a white man would be obsessed with, and devoid entirely of other aspects that would situate him in a more believable identity. The way Othello would’ve been performed at the time—a white production for a white audience, featuring a white Othello in blackface—only reinforces for me the idea of Othello as white spectacle, featuring a creative rendition of a Moor that has little to do with reality.⁷ When Shakespeare tries to make the Other knowable without really knowing him in the first place (and without grounding him in a clear historical background, preferring to shroud him in ambiguity and mystery) he is perhaps doing the Other an ultimate disservice.

Although this paper is not personal, race is often a personal experience felt and lived rather than neatly intellectualized. When Shakespeare writes an Othello who essentially hates himself for being Black, his intentions may have been pure. In painting Othello as a tragic figure worthy of sympathy, a victim of his own Blackness and societal perceptions of it, Shakespeare could have been attempting something radical. However, to me, Shakespeare’s imagining of Othello is vaguely insulting. It evokes for me a passage from Black Skin, White Masks in which Fanon criticizes Sartre’s work Orphée Noir: “Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing.”⁸ In this ever-memorable passage, Fanon expresses eloquently what it feels like to be misrepresented as Black for all of posterity. Although Sartre was a well-intentioned “ally,” his interpretation of the experience of being Black (which is entangled in a transcendent argument for humanism, and that is where the “relativity” comes in) was twice damaging.⁹ It was first of all inaccurate, because a white French man could never know anything of the black lived experience, but more than that, it took up a vital space for Black self-definition. As Fanon puts it, “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”¹⁰ Fanon’s critique is most powerful in the context of existential philosophy, of course, but Othello, just like Orphée Noir, serves as a white “intellectualization of the experience of being black.”¹¹ In both texts, a white male author—canonical, foundational, intellectual authority—makes grand assumptions about the Black psyche; in both works, that same white male author seems to position himself as a positive, savior force. Whenever a white person lays claim to what it means to be Black, a site of disruption is created, wherein a Black audience member is expected to identify with or see as “truth” a representation of himself that cannot be, and certainly does not feel, accurate. The real violence of the play occurs upon this very site. In the wake of Othello, just as in the wake of Orphée Noir, the black audience member finds themselves unmoored, robbed of self-representation, told about themselves.

Throughout my four years at NYU, and unsurprisingly, Othello is the only North African protagonist that I have been presented with. Within the play, he is the character that ends up being the most anti-Black, and his self-destruction enriches the plot in a way that is useful for climatic flair but not for authentic representation. While Othello is an insightful text in a variety of ways, a rereading of the play, with a postcolonial, Black studies lens, can only be so generous. The stunted depiction of Othello as a simple, sympathetic “Moor” is ultimately problematic in its illegibility, and any discourse about the play should leave room for this interpretation. In regards to this text and other canonical works I have encountered during my time at NYU, another line from Black Skin, White Masks comes to mind: “The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself.”¹²

1. Mika Nyoni, “The Culture of Othering: An Interrogation of Shakespeare’s Handling of Race and Ethnicity in The Merchant of Venice and Othello,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 2, no. 4 (January 2012): 680.
2. William Shakespeare, Othello, (The Pelican Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 2001), 5.2.266; 5.2.299; 2.3.144.
3. Shakespeare, Othello, 1.1.125.
4. Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.304-306.
5. Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.502.
6. Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.441-443.
7. Peter Holland, Shakespeare and Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 300).
8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Classics, 2020), 102.
9. Sartre though that Negritude was only useful as a transitory phase on the way to a post-racial reality.
10. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 102.
11. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 134.
12. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Classics, 2020), 103.