Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of Othello

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

In what follows, I draw on recent work that broadly treats the connection between race and emotion—such as the essays gathered in Carol Mejia LaPerle's groundbreaking collection Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature—as well as on more specific research that has begun to explore how disgust becomes racialized.³ Mira 'Assaf Kafantaris, for example, persuasively demonstrates that disgust is a component of how foreign queens are racialized in The Faerie Queene; Gitanjali G. Shahani reveals how disgust toward foreign food marked the European response to other cultures in contemporary travelogues; and Ian Smith has briefly remarked upon the "racial disgust" that Othello's Black skin elicits in Brabantio.⁴ In this essay, I build on this important scholarship not only by offering a historicized account of early modern understandings of disgust but also by developing a broader model for analyzing disgust that is informed by current research in the modern affective sciences.⁵ I take this approach because modern scientific studies of both race and emotion make one thing clear: disgust is central to how out-group prejudice and racial discrimination function in everyday life. That is, a compelling body of evidence demonstrates that we cannot fully account for the workings of racism without accounting for the role that disgust plays in its operation; the description and analysis of racial formations in early modern England can therefore be valuably informed by considering how the dynamics of disgust feature in the forms of marginalization, discrimination, and violence that we find in the historical and literary record. In Othello, the central character's status as a racialized subject comes to be underpinned by constructing his status as a disgusting subject. Racial discourses, I suggest, are thus entwined with affective discourses: while jealousy is the mechanism through which Iago first attacks his master, it is disgust that underwrites how Othello is broadly perceived throughout Venice, and it is the circulation of disgust that underwrites the forms of racial violence that are depicted in Othello.⁶

This essay, then, attempts to contribute to both the study of early modern emotion and the study of early modern race. In terms of emotion studies, my contribution is primarily methodological. I hope to demonstrate: (1) the value—and indeed, necessity—of incorporating racial analysis into our treatment of the affective past, and (2) the value of incorporating insights from the contemporary affective sciences into our historicized study of the intersection of racial and emotional discourses in the early modern period.⁷ In terms of early modern race studies, my contribution is thematic: I use the case study of Othello to further demonstrate how the workings of disgust might help elucidate some of the specific forms that early modern racist violence takes.⁸ The terms through which Othello is racially encoded are consistently drawn from the lexicon of disgust—and they importantly anticipate the findings of the modern scientific research tradition, which consistently shows that disgust is a...