Slavery and Africans..

[DaZahroJaam.]

so there i was this afternoon, watching plasido domingo's otello on youtube, totally minding my own business when i suddenly realized that his face had been painted black and that they were portraying othello as a (grrr) black person. grrr because i don't like referring to them as that since we are not supposed to define people by the color of their skin. so anyways..i remember back in the days when i first saw othello, i didn't think much of the character being played by laurance fisherborne but over the years it kind of occurred to me that he was black. at the time i thought, what the heck, maybe they were looking for someone convincing to play the role and they didn't think of him the fact that he was black but then, why would they paint a white man's face and pass him on as black??
the play was written in 17th century and everyone but otello's character are white. how come he is a king??
so then, when and how were black people subjugated to slavery and how did otello happen to be a king while being surrounded by white people??

could someone fix slavery on the title, please..

[M17ArnoBaloch]

I would appreciate it if you make your text a little bigger. it makes me go blind.

[Haris]

I read Othello like 4 or 5 years ago & watched the film with the guy who is Morpheus from the Matrix (think he's the Fisherbone guy you mentioned).


Othello is a Moor. The Moors were a Muslim peoples with their kingdoms in North Africa, Spain & Sicily (I first learned that from a computer game believe it or not).
The term 'Moor' does not refer to an ethnicity but rather any Muslim from the areas I mentioned (they can be Berbers, Arabs, 'Black' people from further south etc).

In any case, those 'Moors' regardless of their ethnicity are not Europeans...they are not 'white' so they must all be 'brown'/'black'. Hence they would have been seen & treated as inferior (Othello is referred to as a 'Moor' in a derogatory manner a few times).

These Moorish peoples had their own thriving Kingdoms (Al-Andalus in Spain, the Emirate of Sicily etc). Othello is a prince of one such Kingdom. This Kingdom had relations with the other European powers (Othello is an ambassador of the 'Moors' who is recruited as a general in the Venetian army).

It was not a Kingdom of solely 'black' people (the 'black' people you'd consider to be slaves) so it's not like it was a Slave Kingdom or anything like that though i'm sure it did take part in the slave business.



The 'black' people who would be the slaves of the Europeans were generally from further south in Africa (for example, the Nubians from southern Egypt & Sudan for the Roman Empire or the slaves from West Africa for the Colonial European Empires).



The actors portraying Othello will have been 'black' or have their faces painted black to illustrate to the viewers just how alienated & different Othello is from everyone else (the whole point being his relationship with Desdemona being controversial because of his background). This would have been the case when the play was acted out during Shakespeare's time as well.

[$hiva]

This thread so funny, I'm not even going to say why.

Desdemona, I fully understand her...

[Shamlawar Khurasani]

fisherborne guy.

[Kushan Prince]

Morpheus is mad you guys!

[DaZahroJaam.]

thank you haris, that was very interesting. Now I am intrigued to do some further research.