Divels” Eleazar ( 1. 1. 126 ), provides the official rationale for the incrimination
and banishment of allMoors. And while Othello has obvious clout in the
high circles of the Venetian court as “the valiant Moor” ( 1. 3. 48 ), a battery of
racially suggestive, color-coded, and sexually loaded slurs precedes and sur-
rounds his appearance, bringing a debilitating discourse of blackness into
form as something even he will use to condemn his allegedly promiscuous
wife, the fair-skinned “black weed” ( 4. 2. 67 ).
If we start and end with these as the cruxes of the Moor’s story, however,
if we set down these impressions without saying besides, we will, I think, miss
what is equally crucial: within early modern representations, the Moor serves
as a site where competing, always provisional axes of identity come dynami-
cally into play, disrupting our ability, if not also our desire, to assign the Moor
a color, religion, ethnicity, or any homogenizing trait. It is, in fact, the com-
plexity and variability of these cultural and racial inscriptions that make turn-
ing or returning to the Moor, and understanding England’s short but serious
preoccupation with that subject in all its particulars, so pertinent and press-
ing now. For the uncodified diversity that isthe Moor’s story constantly de-
mands negotiation and so draws attention inevitably—in early modern plays
quite consciously—to how and where we draw the line on difference. Because
of course we do. We are at a historical moment when globalization is still
somewhat embryonic, when political and economic relations are organized
increasingly around an expansive and expanding “world”—a moment which,
in that regard, parallels the early modern. At just such moments, the danger
is that the unaccommodating particulars, the differences within differences,
that would otherwise define a cultural history, space, or subject will disappear
under the pressure to accommodate, if not also to conquer or commodify, a
vast and unfamiliar global terrain. The danger is, that is, that in coming to
terms with an overwhelmingly diverse, always changing and expanding set of
unfamiliar subjects, we will either obscure their heterogeneity with homoge-
nizing generalizations or select our differences out, targeting some and not
others as what matters.
The danger has perhaps been especially great in the case of Africa and
Africans, whose multiplex histories have long been blurred together in an un-
differentiated bias against “blacks.” Consider what happened when the British
government declared 2005 “the year of Africa” and, armed with “indigenous
resolve and cash from Western governments,” dedicated its international out-
reach to “a new assault on the roots of poverty in the continent.”^19 Instead of
developing strategies specific to the needs and problems of individual African
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