Iago’s Race, Shakespeare’s Ethnicities

This chapter is the most theoretical contribution in the book and the first of three ‘race’ chapters. I discuss the genealogy of Shakespeare ‘race’ studies to argue that racial thinking is quintessentially a nineteenth-century product and a powerful ethnic fiction aimed at appropriating symbolic capital. A minor Victorian work, A New Exegesis of Shakespeare: Interpretation of His Principal Characters and Plays on the Principle of Races (1859), which purports to demonstrate that the whole of Shakespeare is just a demonstration of how ‘race’ is no less than the main key to human knowledge, is used to discuss Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that the category of ‘race’ should be dropped altogether or, at the very least, supplemented by the largely underutilized notion of ethnicity.

Art · Ethnic group · Exegesis · Interpretation (philosophy) · Key (lock) · Linguistics · Literature · Product (mathematics) · Race (biology) · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy