American Moor

Part of the tension in American Moor stems from the fact that the Director is unable or unwilling to think about the complex racism embedded in Othello. His hesitance mirrors the play’s critical reception. Some critics have historically argued that it is anachronistic to read “race” into Othello (Bartels, Emily. “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered.” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 54, 1997, pp. 45-64). To justify this idea, these critics turn to the ambiguity around the early modern term “Moor,” while others claim that the racial hierarchy set in place by chattel enslavement had not yet taken root—even though it is well documented that the “first voyage carrying enslaved people direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526,” roughly 80 years before Othello’s composition (Mintz, Steven. “Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History). At first, any attention to discussions of race in Shakespeare were confined to his “race plays”: Titus Andronicus, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. These are the Shakespeare plays that most explicitly address race and contain non-white characters.

In 1989, Dr. Ania Loomba broke new critical ground by writing, “Sensitivity to race […] is still in its infancy” in early modern studies, especially in intersectional contexts (Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 1). She also suggests that critics need to reinterpret Shakespeare through this lens to unpack “his privileged position in our curricula” (Loomba 7). Shakespeare’s hegemonic position in the “canon” is something that the Actor engages with in American Moor as he compares the Director’s book learning to his personal experience.

In 1995, Dr. Kim F. Hall’s seminal work, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, further expanded the critical attention to race in early modern literature. She attended not only to racialization of non-white characters—for instance, clearly establishing that Othello “is meant to be perceived as an African”—but also to how white English people constructed their own, racialized whiteness (Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 8). This was an important advance in scholarship because confining discussions of race to Shakespeare’s “race plays” and their non-white characters implies that whiteness and its construction is not an important locus of race-making in the early modern period. American Moor contains a foreword by Hall.

In 1996, Dr. Margo Hendricks suggested that “we have misread, or not read at all, some of the signs of racial thinking present in [early modern] literature” (Hendricks, Margo. “‘Obscured by dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1, 1996, pp. 37-60; 41). Hendricks’s article turns to methods of race-making in plays other than Shakespeare’s “race plays,” demonstrating the universality of discourses of race across Shakespeare’s corpus.

The early work on race and early modern literature was largely done by women of color—Loomba for instance is an Indian scholar, while Hall and Hendricks are Black American scholars. Through the early 21st century, the conversation on race in premodern literature—both medieval and early modern—continued to grow, largely helmed by academic groups such as the Medievalists of Color (MOR) and their early modern corollary “ShakeRace,” a portmanteau of “Shakespeare” and “race” that also speaks to the group’s desire to “shake up” traditional Shakespearean criticism. Their burgeoning academic field was called “premodern critical race studies” (PCRS).

In 2017, a white supremacist rally called “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, Virginia, appropriated medieval symbols. That same year, Dr. Dorothy Kim—a member of the academic group Medievalists of Color—wrote a blog post that asked for “white supremacy” to be “explicitly condemned by the overwhelmingly white population of professors who teach on the subject” (Roll, Nick. “A Schism in Medieval Studies, for All To See.” Inside Higher Ed, 2017). Kim’s fellow medievalist, Rachel Fulton Brown, a contributor to the far-right news site Breitbart, created a series of competing blog posts condemning Kim. In her posts, Fulton Brown posted pictures of Kim and tagged Milo Yiannopoulos, her friend and far-right British commentator, leading to widespread racist harassment, doxing, and threats of death and sexual violence against Kim (Roll).

In 2018, Kim’s fellow Medievalists of Color members, alongside ShakeRace, proposed a series of panels at a pre-eminent conference on medieval studies called the International Congress on Medieval Studies. They wanted to address “the interests and expertise of medievalists of color and their organizational collaborators” (Chaganti, Seeta. “Statement Regarding ICMS Kalamazoo.” Medievalists of Color, 2018). They hoped to bring conversations about premodern critical race studies to the fore. Four of the five proposed sessions—largely featuring the women of color at the forefront of PCRS, including Hall and Kim—were denied, while “similar topics proposed by majority white organizations were accepted” (Chaganti).

In response, Arizona State University offered an “‘alternate home’ for the rejected MOC sessions and a much-needed opportunity for a collaboration between the MOC and ShakeRace communities” by forming the inaugural meeting of a now-annual conference series titled “RaceB4Race,” helmed by Ayanna Thompson (“RaceB4Race.” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Arizona State University). What began as a small research symposium in 2019 has grown into a preeminent conference for and by BIPOC scholars of medieval and early modern literature, supported by outside grants such as the Mellon Foundation.

The story behind the mainstream popularization of PCRS and the creation of RaceB4Race in the academic community serves as parallel for Cobb’s experience as a Black Shakespearean actor who is continually being told that his identity does not matter, that Othello is not the “minstrel show” he perceives it to be, and that people like the Director—who represents the white gaze—are more qualified to talk about Shakespeare than he is. American Moor has been embraced by the ShakeRace and RaceB4Race communities and has been included on RaceB4Race seminar reading lists (Finn, Kavita Mudan. “Race B4 Race Seminar 4: What We’re Reading and Why.” Folger Shakespeare Library, 2023). The play’s sister project, The Untitled Othello Project, works closely with ShakeRace and RaceB4Race communities (“The Untitled Othello Project.” @American Moor, X, 2021). Individual members of the PCRS academic communities have also begun to publish a growing body of criticism about American Moor’s contribution to the conversation on Shakespeare and race, writing that “American Moor embodies this innovative [anti-racist] spirit, resonating powerfully for the twenty-first century” (Corredera, Vanessa I. “Lessons for Whiteness: Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor.” Shakespeare, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 54-57; 54).