“Finally, The Merchant of Venice demonstrates that race was never solely attached to skin colour, but also that skim colour was never too far from nay articulation of race.”*
In the summation of her argument in the sixth chapter of her book, Ania Loomba demonstrates the complications to untangling race, religion, and skin color. Throughout history race, skin color, and religion have been closely connected, whether in the context of slavery, love, or power. Loomba argument, essentially, is that while one cannot automatically assume race and skin color are connected, there can never be truly separate. Examples of this include the “Spanish Moor.” This title intertwines African decent, Spanish nationality (however accurate), and a Muslim religious identity. Loomba mentions this complication when Salman Rushdie’s story The Moor’s Last Sigh, a child of a Christian woman and Jewish man is named a “Moor.” The child is called a “‘Moor’ both because his skin is dark, and because his mother lovingly nicknames him ‘mor’…”** Now these identities as stated above are being attributed to a child that only fits one of the traditional criterion for a “Moor.” It’s interesting to note, that while Othello is known as “the Moor,” his religious identity is never mentioned, but it sometimes assumed because of his title “the Moor.” There are other instances of this phenomenon throughout history.
*Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 160.
** Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 135.
I really think this discussion of pre-modern race is so interesting. In fact, I was directed to a scholar who has been working to push the date for discussions of race back even further, to twelfth-century England. Like I had mentioned in class, representations of the Anglo-Jewry (before and after the Expulsion) and Saracens (what became the medieval English catch-all term for dark skin) in medieval England were often done in a shade darker than their “English” counterparts. When I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago, I even saw a couple French examples of Jews in late medieval and early early modern paintings and stained glass where they are distinguished through a slight darkening of the skin; what appears to be skin now, but perhaps it was a different color when the pieces were crafted.
I find it curious and often kind of strange that there continues to be an assumption of racial difference based on skin color as a mark of modernity to some extent. Why?