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.
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
Indecorum and empire in Titus Andronicus
The gore, violence, and revenge fantasy depicted in Titus Andronicus is usually the first (and sometimes last) thing that people talk about. But it's rarely examined to understand the diliberate questions at stake in the play. Namely, what does it mean for a society to cease to behave decorously?
