
Inkface
Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery
Miles P. Grier(Author)
University of Virginia Press
Published on 31. December 2023
Book
Hardback
346 pages
978-0-8139-5036-5 (ISBN)
Description
In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era of booming print production, popular urban theater, and increasing rates of literacy, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink became essential to a fraternity of literate white men who, by treating an elastic category of marked people as reading material, were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. Inkface examines that fraternity's reading of the world as well as the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Charlottesville
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
16 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 32 mm
Weight
272 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8139-5036-5 (9780813950365)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
12/2023
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
from
€74.99
Available for download
Person
Miles P. Grier is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.
Content
Introduction: The Residue of Inkface
1. The Moor of Venice Reconstructed
"O Bloody Period": Othello's Constitution and Significance
"Letter and Affection," or Iago's Motive Reconsidered
Interlude: Desdemona's Guilt, or "The Farce of Dead Alive"
2. "Be Thus When Thou Art Dead": Aphra Benh's Remediation of Othello
3. "Pale as thy Smock": Abigail Adams in Desdemona's Whites
4. The Cherokee Othello: Treating with 'The Base Indian'
5. Inkface to Chalkbones: The End of White Character Mastery in Melville's "BC"
Epilogue: An Ultimate Reader
1. The Moor of Venice Reconstructed
"O Bloody Period": Othello's Constitution and Significance
"Letter and Affection," or Iago's Motive Reconsidered
Interlude: Desdemona's Guilt, or "The Farce of Dead Alive"
2. "Be Thus When Thou Art Dead": Aphra Benh's Remediation of Othello
3. "Pale as thy Smock": Abigail Adams in Desdemona's Whites
4. The Cherokee Othello: Treating with 'The Base Indian'
5. Inkface to Chalkbones: The End of White Character Mastery in Melville's "BC"
Epilogue: An Ultimate Reader