| Drawing upon a set of cultural artifacts that span almost a century---from Frederick Douglass' publication of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892) to dispatches from the frontlines of the race war staged in Amiri Baraka's The Slave (1964)---this dissertation examines a protracted history of American artists' re-inscribing Shakespeare's Othello to sound the deep structure of American culture and confront the pathology of its white privilege. Throughout his peculiar American career attending to the racial crises dividing America's body politic, the Moor of Venice has remained a totemic figure of American cultural totality as it is supersaturated by racial animus.;The study's prologue establishes Othello both as a fixture in the poetics of hegemony that Simon During calls the "civil Imaginary," and, subsequently, as an embodiment of the syntagmatic regime that W.E.B. Du Bois tropes in his exegesis on the "Veil of Race" in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In Chapter One, I establish a cultural context for the radical re-inscription of Othello by examining Othello's value as a cultural totem. He provided the nation emerging from the trauma of the United States' Civil War with a protean figure to embody emancipation and litigate racial privileges and privations in the court of public opinion. In Chapter Two, I examine Frederick Douglass' casual use of the commonplace expression "Othello's occupation's gone" (3.3.373) and trace his careful scrutiny of the surplus value that adheres to America's cultural totems.;Chapter Three modulates the argument's master trope from the civil Imaginary to this dissertation's eponymous veil, Du Bois' Veil of Race. In "Of the Passing of the First Born," from The Souls of Black Folk, the presence of the Veil marks Du Bois' indictment of his own incipience in the apartheid politics of racial signification. Douglass' prosecution of the politics of commonplaces and Du Bois' epistemology of the Veil converge in Chapter Four---my examination of twentieth century re-inscriptions of Othello in works by James Weldon Johnson, Eugene O'Neill, and Amiri Baraka. These works reiterate Iago's deceit of Othello and indict an American cultural context that pressures from its African American citizens acquiescence to a narrow set of existential possibilities.;The epistemology of the veil, then, posits the Veil of Race as a scandalous precept---an integument attenuating the historical real and creating, from the uncommon power of hegemonies manifest in the "common sense" of the day, the civil Imaginary. To see beyond this threshold, the epilogue looks beyond the boundaries of the study's concentration on American culture to Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1968). Salih revives Othello to re-tell the Moor's tragedy as a ghost story haunting a young Sudanese intellectual who has returned home from London to his unnamed village by a bend in the Nile. The survival of the young Narrator, despite the troubling shadow cast by Shakespeare's Moor, is a sorrow song to the residue of the historical real and a record of a young nation's longing to live in a civil Imaginary of its own making. |
