Speaking of the Moor From "Alcazar" to "Othello" Emily C. Bartels
"Bartels is one of the first, and certainly one of the most
influential, literary critics to emphasize the crucial point that
before the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, Africa's place in
early modern English conceptualizations was open ended. She shows
with great clarity that narratives of Africa were diverse and
unpredictable."--Mary Floyd-Wilson, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill "Bartels discovers a surprising openness in the
treatment of the Moor in early modern England. Her book makes a
significant contribution to our understanding of the formative
history of race and color."--Michael Neill, University of Auckland
Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
"Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the
play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to
speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a
Moor in the early modern period? In the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, when England was expanding its reach across
the globe, the Moor became a central character on the English
stage. In "The Battle of Alcazar," "Titus Andronicus," "Lust's
Dominion," and "Othello," the figure of the Moor took definition
from multiple geographies, histories, religions, and skin colors.
Rather than casting these variables as obstacles to our--and
England's--understanding of the Moor's racial and cultural
identity, Emily C. Bartels argues that they are what make the Moor
so interesting and important in the face of growing globalization,
both in the early modern period and in our own. In "Speaking of the
Moor," Bartels sets the early modern Moor plays beside
contemporaneous texts that embed Moorish figures within England's
historical record--Richard Hakluyt's "Principal Navigations," Queen
Elizabeth's letters proposing the deportation of England's
"blackamoors," and John Pory's translation of "The History and
Description of Africa." Her book uncovers the surprising complexity
of England's negotiation and accommodation of difference at the end
of the Elizabethan era. Emily C. Bartels is Associate Professor of
English at Rutgers University and Associate Director of the Bread
Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She is author of
"Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe,"
also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. 2008 264
pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-4076-4 Cloth $55.00s 36.00 ISBN
978-0-8122-2101-5 Paper $22.50s 15.00 World Rights Literature Short
copy: "Speaking of the Moor" explores why the Moor became a central
character on the English stage at the turn of the sixteenth
century. Looking closely at key early modern dramatic and
historical texts, the book uncovers the Moor's complex identity as
a Mediterranean figure poised provocatively between European and
non-European worlds.
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