Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Julia Reinhard Lupton

Critical Essay by Julia Reinhard Lupton

SOURCE: Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations.” Representations 57 (winter 1997): 73-89.

In this essay, Lupton maintains that in Othello religious difference is more significant than racial difference, for—according to Renaissance doctrine—if the Moor was a Muslim rather than a pagan before his conversion to Christianity, he is forever barred from the congregation of universal brotherhood.

In his essay “Is There a Neo-Racism?” Etienne Balibar proposes that we now live under a new ideology of the nations, a “racism-without-races” that promotes various forms of ethnic cleansing under the alibi of “cultural” identity, purity, or autonomy, a discourse that co-opts and neutralizes the postwar vocabulary of liberal humanism and pluralism. Balibar links this neoracism of the late modern to the protoracism of the early modern period:

A racism which does not have the pseudo-biological concept of race as its main driving force has always existed,...
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