the king’s favorite by the repulsive royal stepson, Cloten. In the early modern
period lineages such as these also fell under the umbrella of “race,” and that
these stories have not ushered in their own obsessions is a telling sign that not
all racial and cultural differences carry the same weight or garner the same in-
terest in or across time periods. Nor do they hold the same meanings. Is Oth-
ello really a “black male” in his first incarnation (or second, if we count
Cinthio)? Or, what’s different, is he a Moor, called “black” by some (includ-
ing himself ), not others, when it serves their turns, his skin color only one of
his distinguishing and demonized features? In summing up his story, can we
assign him a “black ethnicity” when he and his audiences do not?^24 And in
the aftermath of 9 – 11 , were we to revive the morally freighted dichotomy be-
tween African and Arabian embodiments of Othello, the one (African) long
imagined by critics, actors, and producers as the more savage, the other (Ara-
bian) the more noble, would the Arabian Moor still come out on top?^25
These examples remind us how vulnerable “African” subjects, in particu-
lar, still are to codification and obfuscation within globally oriented and trans-
historical narratives, even after more obvious discriminations have come
under decades of critique. As our political, historical, and literary frames ex-
pand, so too may the impulse to classify whatever may otherwise seem to be
an endlessly proliferating set of variables. It is all the more important, then,
to understand the complexities that define and disturb early modern represen-
tations of Moors. Whatever else we may learn, to sit down to read the Moor
once again in an era of globalization is at once to recover a particular and pe-
culiar history of difference and to remember difference as always particularly
and peculiarly historical.
***From the start, studies of the Moor, along with the related topics of Africa and
race, have served to challenge, if not in some cases dismantle, some of the in-
stitutional, political, intellectual, and textual boundaries limiting our views of
the early modern period. To take on these subjects, with all their indetermi-
nacy, as the defining matter of English literature has been to acknowledge the
diversity of England’s material and imaginative interests, the centrality of its
cross-cultural relations, and the tentativeness of its—and finally any—“world
picture.” It has been to open up both what and how we read and teach, to call
attention to identities and differences that authorizing narratives have effec-
tively obscured in and long after the early modern period. Even so, in com-
introduction 9