Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to OthelloSelected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern period? In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when England was expanding its reach across the globe, the Moor became a central character on the English stage. In The Battle of Alcazar, Titus Andronicus, Lust's Dominion, and Othello, the figure of the Moor took definition from multiple geographies, histories, religions, and skin colors. Rather than casting these variables as obstacles to our--and England's--understanding of the Moor's racial and cultural identity, Emily C. Bartels argues that they are what make the Moor so interesting and important in the face of growing globalization, both in the early modern period and in our own. In Speaking of the Moor, Bartels sets the early modern Moor plays beside contemporaneous texts that embed Moorish figures within England's historical record--Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Queen Elizabeth's letters proposing the deportation of England's "blackamoors," and John Pory's translation of The History and Description of Africa. Her book uncovers the surprising complexity of England's negotiation and accommodation of difference at the end of the Elizabethan era. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 85
... Moors " : Lust's Dominion and the Story of Spain CHAPTER SIX Cultural Traffic : The History and Description of Africa and the Unmooring of the Moor 138 CHAPTER SEVEN 118 100 The " stranger of here and everywhere " : Othello and the Moor ...
... Moors , we'd like to assume that we have the advantage , at least over the char- acters , whose views are circumscribed and whose capacity to view is always only a fiction . " What [ we ] know , [ we ] know , " to borrow dangerously ...
... Moors ) ; or , by an even more promiscuous extension , ... might be ap- plied ( like ' Indian ' ) to almost any darker - skinned peoples — even , on occasion , those of the New World . " 6 Not always an ethnic type , " Moor " might also ...
... Moorish characters take their bearings on the English stage in the short period berween Alcazar and Othello , the ... Moors de- rives directly and indirectly from the extravagant figures of both Jew and Turk in Christopher Marlowe's Jew ...
... Moorish king of Fez , provides the material and figurative ( and if he could have it , erotic ) means for the ever ... Moors are seamlessly enmeshed in the multicultural forces of the Turks , fighting alongside Arabians , Jews , Grecians ...
Contents
Enter Barbary The Battle of Alcazar and the World | 21 |
Imperialist Beginnings Hakluyts Navigations and the Place and Displacement of Africa | 45 |
Incorporate in Rome Titus Andronicus and the Consequence of Conquest | 65 |
Too Many Blackamoors Deportation Discrimination and Elizabeth I | 100 |
Banishing all the Moors Lusts Dominion and the Story of Spain | 118 |
Cultural Traffic The History and Description of Africa and the Unmooring of the Moor | 138 |
The stranger of here and everywhere Othello and the Moor of Venice | 155 |
A Brave New World | 191 |
NOTES | 195 |
227 | |
243 | |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 251 |