Inkface - (Writing the Early Americas) by Miles P Grier

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era of booming print production, popular urban theater, and increasing rates of literacy, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink became essential to a fraternity of literate white men who, by treating an elastic category of marked people as reading material, were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. Inkface examines that fraternity's reading of the world as well as the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.

Review Quotes

Inkface is poised to make significant contributions to the scholarly literatures on racialization in early modern British literary and performance culture and its legacies in North America. The critical, intellectual, and ideological aims of Inkface are ambitious, urgent, and generative. This book has changed so much of what I thought I knew about Othello--and all for the better!

Inkface proves its relevance to several different fields, including Shakespeare, performance studies, early American literature, and studies of race in the Atlantic world. Clearly and persuasively written and deeply researched, this book demonstrates just how central a text Othello is to formations of racial selves and to the ways we assign racial identities to others.

Grier's excellent book combines the literary analysis of canonical texts with an exploration of crucial moments in the stage and reception histories of Othello. It does so with an acute awareness of the complex intersections of race, class, and gender, reconstructing historical responses to Othello and its 'inkfacing' strategies as well as the interventions by women and racialized Others. The monograph is thoroughly informed by recent approaches to the study of Shakespeare and Race, as well as feminist readings of Shakespeare. But Grier refrains from merely reiterating established statements about Othello, and it is this deviation from standard interpretations of the play and familiar stories about its reception that makes his book such as fascinating read.

Miles Grier's Inkface brilliantly traces the complex semiotic work performed by blackface in Shakespeare's Othello and its inky progeny on the page and stage across a longue durée, beginning with its inception in early seventeenth century England and then crossing the Atlantic to consider its textual and theatrical afterlives in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The hermeneutics of inkface, Grier argues, far from simply grounding racialized character in an ostensibly indelible reality that renders blackness legible for white interpretive communities, loosens signifier from signified, revealing its saturation with unwieldy significations that become untethered from the "real" and thus open to resignification.

About the Author

Miles P. Grier is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.