Edward Said, Orientalism(New York: Vintage Books, 1978 ).
Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550 – 1688
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982 ), ix.
Tokson, 2 , 19.
Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of
Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1987 ), 202. Barthelemy concludes, “How these assumptions...have come to
shape our lives and the opinions of our contemporaries about blacks is, I am afraid to say,
all too easy to assess. For many, blackness still signifies evil and sin, and black people re-
main the Other, excluded still” ( 202 ).
Barthelemy, x; see also 1 – 17.
The one exception is Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama
(Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991 ), which reads “Moorish culture” against
the stable backdrop of a “Western perspective” ( 76 , 78 ). Though D’Amico argues that Re-
naissance dramatists press spectators to reassess “certain racial, religious, and cultural pre-
conceptions,” for him that reassessment happens only along a rigid self/other divide ( 1 ). In
the end what prompts and defines the revision are Moorish characters who reflect “West-
ern values” ( 119 ), exhibiting “a basic human need to protect one’s own” ( 137 ), a “human ca-
pacity for survival and renewal” ( 145 ), and a “common human complexion” ( 177 ).
Gates, 2.
See especially Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean,
1492–1797(London: Methuen, 1986 ); and Paul Brown, “ ‘This thing of darkness I acknowl-
edge mine’: The Tempestand the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New
Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1985 ), 48 – 71. See also Martin Orkin, “Othello and the ‘plain face’
of Racism,”Shakespeare Quarterly 38 ( 1987 ): 166 – 88.
Key examples include Karen Newman, “ ‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity
and the Monstrous in Othello,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideol-
ogy, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987 ), 143 – 62 ;
Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama(Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1989 ); Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,”
Shakespeare Quarterly40,no. 4(Winter 1989 ): 383 – 412 ; Margo Hendricks and Patricia
Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, (London: Routledge,
1994 ); Kim F. Hall,Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern
England(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995 ). On these contributions, see Peter
Erickson, “The Moment of Race in Renaissance Studies,” Shakespeare Studies 26 ( 1998 ):
27 – 36. Subsequent extensions of this trajectory include: Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare
Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage(London: Rout-
ledge, 2000 ); Arthur L. Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of
Race, Rape, and Sacrifice(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002 ); and Joyce
Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002 ). See also Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds., Shake-
speare and Race, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ); in it, Margo Hendrick’s
