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(Un) Reliable Sight (Un) Reliable Sight
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The Panoptic Regime of Whiteness The Panoptic Regime of Whiteness
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Racism’s Mental Deformity Racism’s Mental Deformity
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The Audience’s Mind’s Eye The Audience’s Mind’s Eye
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Reading and White Preference Reading and White Preference
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Select Bibliography Select Bibliography
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25 Seeing Blackness: Reading Race in Othello
Get accessIan Smith, Professor of English at Lafayette College, is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009). He has published on Shakespeare and early modern drama as well as postcolonial literature with work appearing in several anthologies and journals. He is currently preparing a book on early modern English blackface theatre entitled Fabricated Identities: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.
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Published:02 November 2016
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Abstract
The tendency to regard vision as providing unimpeded retinal access to the world was already being revised in the early modern period to explain how sight is, in fact, unreliable. Sight is always compromised by culturally embedded ideas, and in Othello, Shakespeare reveals that in the instance of race, prejudicial and broadly shared stereotypes distort vision in ways that misrecognize blackness and make us poor readers of humanity. Blackness, that visible sign, creates a social blind spot. Taking Shakespeare’s specific interrogation of cross-racial reading as its cue, the essay asks to what extent the predominantly white discipline of English studies is implicated in such an inquiry, especially when modern experimental science confirms white bias and negative views of blackness as the American cultural norm that affects the way we read and interpret race.
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