Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "All Our Othellos: Shakespeare and the War on Terror." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/shakespeare-and-the-war-on-terror. [Date accessed].

Shakespeare and the War on Terror

Showing how teaching our existing narratives of European and English encounters with Islam might affirm stereotypes of what it means to be Muslim in lieu of destabilizing them.

Download the transcript
Ambereen Dadabhoy
Harvey Mudd College

All Our Othellos: Shakespeare and the War on Terror | Watch the full talk

Presented by Ambereen Dadabhoy at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Ambereen Dadabhoy investigates the long history of the logics of the War on Terror and how these structure narratives about Muslims across the centuries. Here, she engages the question with reference to Shakespeare’s Othello, the portraiture of Velazquez (1599-1660), Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012), and contemporary discourses of white supremacy. Dadabhoy’s talk draws upon the connective tissue between these cultural fragments to show how teaching our existing narratives of European and English encounters with Islam might affirm stereotypes of what it means to be Muslim in lieu of destabilizing them.

Further learning

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Finding Black women in Shakespeare

Joyce Green MacDonald traces ways early modern texts and genres process the classical past and how that construction of the past is made known in the present.

Joyce Green MacDonald
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

A brief history of Indian policy

A bit of the history leading up to the start of the contemporary Native theater movement. While not a comprehensive history, this is a small ideological dip into some of the major cultural shifts and moments in policy.

Madeline Sayet