Virgin and Ape, Venetian and Infidel: Labellings of Otherness in Oliver Parker’s Othello

Abstract

In February 1998, Kofi Anan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, arrived in Iraq to confront the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Of all the things that were crucially relevant to Anan’s high-profile embassy, colour was certainly not one of them. And yet, in the context of a world order which, in other respects, is anything but consistently equitable in its view of black and white, the symbolism of his ‘ride to the rescue’ of ‘the civilized world’ (as characterized in the Wall Street Journal) can carry a Shakespearean resonance: a black African was the commissioned representative of an organization, the majority of whose central power has traditionally lain in white communities, upholding its values against the dangerous infidel.1 Seen in this light, Anan’s mission to Iraq exposes the degrees of alterity that sometimes underpin cultural relations. In the face of a common foe explicitly defined in ‘the civilized world’ in terms of its absolute alterity, subsidiary categories of alien and insider — black and white, African and Euro-American — are pragmatically elided.