Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of Othello

Abstract

The ongoing development of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) is perhaps the most exciting intellectual current in early modern studies today.1 In this essay, I attempt to put the vital insights of this research into conversation with scholarship from another prominent subfield: the interdisciplinary study of emotion.2 I do so through a reading of Othello, in which I argue that the circulation of racial meaning in Othello’s Venice is intimately tied to the circulation of affective meaning—and that the inscription of racial identity onto Othello by the inhabitants of Venice is fundamentally an emotional process. More specifically, I will suggest that the affective mode of disgust plays a central role in how Othello is perceived by others in the play. While few would deny that jealousy is the dominant (and most explicitly articulated) emotion in Othello, I argue that racialized disgust is what more precisely animates Iago’s plot to undo his master, serving both as a personal motivator and as an instrument by which he poisons how Othello is perceived by others.