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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.
Reviewer: Christy Desmet
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 explicitly, as the 'subjects' of representation; black women implicitly, as the abjected and/or marginalized subjects of the suppressed counter-narrative" (10). While she argues strongly against the absorption of "sex" as a critical category into "race" in a monolithic story of marginalization, Daileader is not just making a plea for taking women seriously in tales of interracial relations. From her perspective, the Othello figure who spies on and murders his unfaithful wife is a raced stand-in for the reader or spectator in masculinist-racist discourse. The Othello myth lets the (male) (racist) reader have it both ways. Thus, Desdemona gets what she deserves because pitch always defiles, so that Othello's blackness must rub off on her. At the same time, by virtue of his race, within the narrative of miscegenation Othello himself can be disposed of as a cultural afterthought or abjected as just another manifestation of dark femininity.
On the surface, Daileader's project might seem...