Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery

Inkface by Miles P. Grier explores how Shakespeare's Othello was produced and how the painted stage Moor and his wife became essential types for a presumed white male audience. It also examines how those excluded attempted to counteract the fraternity's reading of the world.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 31 December 2023
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

In his book "Inkface," Miles P. Grier delves into the productions of Shakespeare's "Othello" across different centuries, from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier explores how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became essential types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. During an era of flourishing print production, popular urban theater, and rising literacy rates, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink gained significant importance within a fraternity of literate white men. By treating a flexible category of marked individuals as reading material, these men were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. "Inkface" examines not only the fraternity's interpretation of the world but also the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.

Inkface delves into the productions of Shakespeare's "Othello" across different centuries, from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier explores how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became essential types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. During an era of flourishing print production, popular urban theater, and rising literacy rates, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink gained significant importance within a fraternity of literate white men. By treating a flexible category of marked individuals as reading material, these men were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. "Inkface" examines not only the fraternity's interpretation of the world but also the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 156 x 234 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780813950372