Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Emily C. Bartels

Critical Essay by Emily C. Bartels

SOURCE: "Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 433-54.

In the following excerpt, Bartels discusses the figure of the racial "Other" in Titus Andronicus—the Moor, Aaron.

In the catalogue for the 1983 exhibition of the Association of Artists of the World contre/against Apartheid, Jacques Derrida offered what he hoped would someday, after the abolition of apartheid, be "Racism's Last Word" ( "Le Dernier Mot du racisme "), one that would record the name ("apartheid") of what no longer would be there to be named.

¹ Derrida's introduction and the exhibition would be the only things left to give the term meaning, or rather, to signal its ultimate meaninglessness and to prove its boundaries false. While the language of racism pretends to be descriptive, Derrida writes, it is instead prescriptive: "It does not discern, it discriminates."...
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