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

Download the transcript
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

Essay

Navigating mixed-race identities in Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity.

Kyle Grady
RaceB4Race Highlight

Anti-Blackness in colonial Mexico

Miguel A. Valerio discusses anti-Black matters and events in colonial Mexico City and the racialization of slavery more broadly in connection to the people of African descent in colonial Mexico and the Atlantic at large.

Miguel A. Valerio
Activity

Journaling through questions of race

The journal is a place where students can engage in dialogue with themselves. This kind of reflection helps students track how their understandings of race develop over time.

Kyle Grady