if it were not a sign of the Gothic queen’s adultery, or how Lucius and Mar-
cus would react to the Moor were they not staging a precarious and indefen-
sible political coup, any more than we can know how the Venetians would
react to Othello if the Turks were not threatening Cyprus. Rome does not
have an absolute stand on the Moor’s reproduction of a blackness any more
than Venice has an absolute stand on the Moor’s marriage to a Venetian.
There is, after all, no single Rome, just as there is no single Venice. In Titus,
as in Othello, interpretations of the Moor happen inside, not outside, the cul-
tural moment. Within the Roman world of conquest, discrimination against
the Moor appears at once monumental and incidental as a political act. And
if the Moor marks the breaking point between the “true substance” of a Rome
in the making and the “false shadow” of a Rome already made, it is not be-
cause his image can be permanently fixed but because his “incorporation”
within this signal space of Europe cannot.
“Incorporate in Rome” 99