A Note on Othello

Othello can be considered representative of the struggle among subaltern identities for scraps left by the dominant. And this extends not only to Othello, though his is perhaps the clearest example in the play. To the signori of Venice, Othello represents two important racist assumptions: virility and violence. In a manner familiar to us from no end of cultural representations, Othello’s sexuality threatens to corrupt and steal white women like Desdemona; Brabantio fears and hates this about Othello, to the extent of disowning Desdemona when it turns out she was “half the wooer”. At the same time, Brabantio and the rest of the nobility need Othello’s capacity for violence - another racist trope - to further their imperial project in the Mediterranean. Othello himself gains both military and personal advantages because of his military prowess, but remains at all times a second-class citizen, only retaining the perks of generalship and admiration as long as his violence proves useful. He in turn metes out his own dominated status on Desdemona who, as a daughter of the nobility, possesses a kind of freedom and agency that the other women in the play, Emilia and Bianca, do not know. She benefits from white supremacy while being subjugated as a woman.

Emilia and Bianca, the servant and the sex-worker, are really nothing but pawns. Theirs is the lowest position in the play, subject to Iago’s designs, toyed with - in Bianca’s case - by Cassio. They have almost no agency at all, but at least Shakespeare gave them personalities.

It is in Iago, though, the real “main character” (in both a traditional and 21st-century social media sense) of the play. His is the anger of the lower class towards nobility and education (Cassio) but any legitimate class grievance is mitigated by his own fear of Black sexuality, as it turns out that his real hatred of Othello is due to the fact that he believes Othello to have slept with Iago’s wife. This fear turns back on itself not only because it forms the basis of Iago’s revenge on Othello, but because it fits in with a paranoid fear of female sexuality that infuses every aspect of the play. There is also the question of Iago’s own subjugated homosexuality, and the issue of homosocial relationships in the closed environment of an occupied city. The infection of the white working class by anti-Black racism, serving only the purposes of the colonial power, is analyzed by W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, and in Iago we get one of the clearest examples of that process at work.

Because, while race, gender, class, and sexuality are being struggled through in occupied Cyprus, the real colonizers are safely back in Venice with their profits. They are not bothered by Othello’s sexuality and violence as long as both are miles away and serving their purpose. They are not worried by women or the lower classes getting above their station because they know that men are there to reproduce the Venetian structures of domination without much oversight. The Venetian nobility exercise a level of hegemony that Gramsci and Stuart Hall would have been amazed by: they don’t need physical coercion, as long as racism, sexism, and class structure will serve to keep the social structure in line. Military power - exemplified by Othello - is needed only against foreigners, strangers, and the deployment of an African against the Turkish empire is a clear example of the way particularly US foreign policy has used subaltern puppet states to further imperial designs.