Fred Moten on Othello and White Fantasies of Blackness

Fred Moten writes about Shakespeare's Othello, "a 'problem play,' one doubly so," for the Paris Review. "[T]hat Othello is a moor of Venice means that the problem of the color line, which W. E. B. Du Bois locates in the twentieth century at its outset, is a problem of the centuries, whether we are talking about the seventeenth, twentieth, or twenty-first." More:

White fantasies of blackness underwrite both the play and its main character such that Othello’s dignity—given in an insistence upon his dignity that renders him all but absolutely undignified—becomes the charge of a series of great black performers, from Ira Aldridge to Laurence Fishburne. Part of the respectability they would bring to and find in both character and play resides in their refusal to allow, from instance to instance in the more recent history of the play’s production, the character to be portrayed by a white actor in blackface, particularly insofar as such an actor might succumb to the tempting imperative to reveal the Moor as dupe and as duplicitous. Tragedy ought not be let to fall into comic foolishness, especially when black folks and our dignity are involved, by way of the indignities of voluntary conscription. It’s not that tragedy doesn’t so fall from time to time in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, whether in what folks are wont to call tragedy proper or in various comical or historical or comical historical excursions into the realm of the tragic, as when Polonius breaks the law of genre when he would recite it, or in Hamlet’s all-but-slapstick inability to act, or the silliness of Richard of Bordeaux’s sadness; it’s just that in those cases it is generally assumed to have nothing to do with us either in Hamlet’s or Richard II’s themes or casting, Shakespeare’s invention of the human, there, being not but nothing other than his invention of whiteness, too.

Isn’t it absolutely appropriate, then, that a white actor should enact, and be thoughtfully responsible for, a white fantasy of blackness? But that’s just a black fantasy of whiteness and its mythic capabilities...

Find it all at the Paris Review.