Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee.

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses

Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, by Celia R. Daileader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 253. Cloth $70.00; Paper $25.99.

In this book, Celia Daileader has set herself a large task. Spanning four centuries, her study of what she calls "Othellophilia" or the "Othello Myth" also moves back and forth across the Atlantic. Rather than detail lovingly the historical variations on her theme, Daileader pursues with a clear singleness of purpose the process by which Othello's story not only retains its currency, but also edges out other ideological variations on interracial sexual relations. Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth "proceeds from the simple observation that in Anglo-American culture from the Renaissance onward, the most widely read, canonical narratives of inter-racial sex have involved black men and white women" (7). While a "desire to exorcise 'collective psychological demons'" might well be at work in the texts Daileader studies, she posits that Anglo-American culture's obsession with sex between black men and white women (a formula that inverts the sad realities of imperialism and slave culture) has less to do with race per se than with an imaginative appropriation of black men to control women, both black and white: "Othellophilia as a cultural construct is first and foremost about women--white women...

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