Celia R. Daileader: Racism, Misogyny, and the ‘Othello’ Myth. Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee.

• Indira Ghose

Discussions of race in early modern culture tend to focus obsessively on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the noble Moor. Celia Daileader takes a radically different approach. The play is less about black men than about women, she insists. For her, “the story of Shakespeare’s Othello . . . is the story of a woman killed – smothered in her bed – for having sex”. Daileader sets out to demonstrate how racism is inextricably bound up with misogyny, tracing the way racist discourses have consistently served to reinforce ideological constraints on women’s desire. Why, she asks, has the Othello paradigm dominated cultural memory to the exclusion of other models of inter-racial relationships? Her answer is breathtakingly simple. Firstly, it served as a didactic parable for white women, who were forcefully reminded of the fatal consequences of transgressing the miscegenation taboo. Secondly, it enabled white men to deflect collective guilt about what was arguably the far more frequent form of inter-racial contact: the large-scale sexual exploitation of black slave women.

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