For They Need to Believe Themselves White: An intertextual analysis of Orson Welles's ‘Othello’

Abstract

This article proposes to reassess Orson Welles's Othello ( 1951 ) in light of his earliest and little examines short, The Hearts of Age ( 1934 ). Refining textual analysis with the tools of whiteness studies and a focus on how American media history is reflected in the film, the article demonstrates that Welles's Othello makes a strong (and often misunderstood or ignored) critical intervention of progressive racial politics, a politics which is, moreover, already located in Shakespeare's original source text.