Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "Othello and the epithet of 'Moor.'" Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/othello-and-the-epithet-of-moor. [Date accessed].

Othello and the epithet of "Moor"

Reading between the lines of Shakespeare’s othering language

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Ambereen Dadabhoy
Harvey Mudd College

The coded language of the War on Terror, the 2017 Muslim ban, and the conflict in Gaza is not new. Muslims have been stereotypically portrayed as violent and tyrannical since the premodern periods. It’s important for students to be able to identify these strategic maneuvers in premodern literature and culture so that they can see these reflected in our present moment and identify them as false and misleading constructions. Ambereen Dadabhoy uses Shakespeare’s Othello as a text through which students can think about contemporary Islamophobia and the tropes about Muslim people that we still encounter today.

Further learning

Reading list

Staging Islam and Shakespeare

Ambereen Dadabhoy’s course asks students to investigate how individual, cultural, and political Muslim identity is manufactured in Shakespeare’s canon.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Video

Early modern Orientalism

Dadabhoy's course asks students to read  premodern texts to deconstruct enduring fictions about Islam and Muslims across time and place.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Activity

Tracing tropes

Ambereen Dadabhoy’s semester-long sequence of assignments aims to support students in their own knowledge production through the interpretations of primary texts.

Ambereen Dadabhoy

Recommended

Reading list

Reading race in Shakespeare

Suggested readings from Ian Smith for an in-depth understanding of the "cliché of race."

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Empire and gender in Titus Andronius

Titus Andronicus exposes how empire shapes gender. Tamora’s vilified fertility contrasts Lavinia’s enforced silence, revealing how both motherhood and chastity are distorted within imperial power and revenge.

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The cliché of race

Probing the cliché of race is a necessary moral objective and pedagogic requirement that begins by making race visible in Shakespeare’s texts to disrupt the prevalence of a destructive, convenient untruth.

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