Shakespeare’s Othello and The Romance of Antar: The Politics of Racism and Self-Fashioning

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article makes use of two approaches to examine the misogynist and racist discourses in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604). I will read the play alongside a Palestinian intertext, the Romance of Antar (525–608), in order to illuminate the ways in which traditional Palestinian culture can be more liberal than that of early modern England. The racial discourse that the Romance of Antar embodies enables me to scrutinize this discourse in Othello. While Antar reiterates his otherness without self-contempt, I assert that Othello’s internalisation of the racial discourse leads to his self-degradation which he projects onto Desdemona. In addition, I will present a psychoanalytic reading of Othello which, perhaps more than any other critical approach, can expose uncomfortable truths about the ways in which hidden same-sex desires and loyalties challenge the heterosexual marriage of Desdemona and Othello. I argue that Othello’s projection of the racist and misogynist discourse that Iago breathes into his ears onto Desdemona and his eventual murder of her are signs of Othello’s defeat and loss of self-respect. Likewise, many Palestinians project their verbal and physical humiliation by the Israeli occupation onto Palestinian women, playing the role of the colonial power in the domestic sphere.