Linked Reading: Digital Historicism and Early Modern Discourses of Race around Shakespeare’s Othello

Abstract

As Renaissance conceptions of otherness have become a locus of critical study,no work has been more central for making the case about dominant ideologiesof race than Shakespeare’s Othello. Ania Loomba has suggested that ”more than any other play of the time, Othello allows us to see that skin colour, religion,and location were often contradictorily yoked together within ideologies of ‘race,’and that all these attributes were animated by notions of sexual and gender difference.”