explore how shakespeare presents race/racial anxieties

thesis

• Throughout the Elizabethan era, outward appearance and race became an indicator of personal intentions and disposition, deciding your place in society

• Shakespeare, therefore, presents race/racial anxieties as a destructive social construct weaponised to isolate the protagonist, Othello

• Perhaps the playwright aims to expose the effects of a socially crafted identity

constructs an identity to dispute what society think about him = racial views can be disputed - destructive as it force a facade of a identity

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

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

identity is manipulated

succumbs and isolations

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