Race

Nature

Ania Loomba’s argument that location, skin colour and class are seen to add up to ‘nature’ itself

Tragedy

Othello was a ’tragedy of racial conflict’ - American Actor Paul Robeson

Emancipation

Othello ‘proved a significant symbol in the struggle for black emancipation’ - Rex Gibson

Threat

Actor Hugh Quashire (who played Othello in the RSC 2015 production) went on to say that the stereotype of the Elizabethan stage was that ‘whenever a Moor appeared, that usually signaled something menacing, or a threat to the social, moral, and sexual order of society’

Belief about moors and muslims

Ania Loomba’s argument that the presentation of Othello ‘stands at the complicated crux of contemporary belief about black people and Muslims’

Fantasy and Nightmare of being an outsider

Ania Loomba’s argument that Othello is both a fantasy of social tolerance and a nightmare of racial hatred and how this highlights the different experiences in Venice of ‘foreign’ outsiders, Othello and Cassio

manipulation of race

Newman’s point that Iago’s manipulation of Othello ‘depends on the Moor’s own prejudices against his blackness and belief that the fair Desdemona would prefer the white Cassio’

Conflict

Ania Loomba claims that the conflict in the play is “between the racism of a white patriarchy and the threat posed to it by both a black man and a white women”

• meaning that institutions that are controlled and policed by a white culture amplify his outsider status

Typicality

“only when Othello begins to think of himself as a typical black man […] that the seeds of tragedy are sown” - Salgado

Uniqueness

“Othello’s colour is dramatically important as a symbol of his own uniqueness of Desdemona’s choice” - Salgado

Status

“Othello is […] a Christian and Venetian general. This makes him an honorary white man in some ways, but his colour still marks him as different” - Ania Loomba

Victim

“Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones” - Ania Loomba

Jealousy, Racism, Sexism

‘othello’s vulnerability as a black outsider […] is inseparable from his thraldom to a patriarchal concept of masculinity and a misogynistic concept of marriage’ - Kierman Ryan

Desdemona vs Othello

‘Desdemona keeps alive the image of a besieged, white femininity so crucial to the production of the black man as a ‘savage’’ - Jyotsna Singh

The Other

the Other is a literary theory that establishes power imbalances and a symbol of the oppressed and the repressed