Ottoman History Podcast - The Stage Turk in Early Modern English Drama

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

with Ambereen Dadabhoy hosted by Maryam Patton and Chris Gratien | William Shakespeare's lifetime overlapped with the height of Ottoman prowess on the world stage, which is partly why so many Turkish characters graced the Elizabethan stage during the 16th and 17th centuries. As our guest Ambereen Dadabhoy explains, the representations of "Turks" and "Moors" in early modern English drama offer a window onto conceptions of race in Europe before the modern period. In this conversation, Dadabhoy shares her experience writing and teaching about race in early modern English literature, and we reflect on the value of Shakespeare for charting connections and transformations in conceptions of Muslim societies from Shakespeare's time to the present. « Click for More »

Hi Chris, this is Ambreen and this is my audio sample I will be reading from Richard Knoll's General History of the Turks, dated 1603, and this is from his Letter to the Christian Reader. There stepped up among the Turks in Bithynia one Usman, or Othman, of the Ousean tribe or family, a man of great spirit and valor, who by little and little growing up amongst the rest of his countrymen and the other effeminate Christians on that side of Asia, at last, like another Romulus, took upon him the name of Sultan or King, and is right worthily accounted the first father of the mighty empire of the Turks, which continued by many descents directly

in the line of himself, even unto Mahomet the third of that name, who now reigneth and is from a small beginning become the greatest terror of the world, and holding in subjection many great and mighty kingdoms in Asia, Europe, and Africa, is grown to that height of pride as that it threateneth destruction unto the rest of the kingdoms of the earth, laboring with nothing more than the weight of itself. I'm Chris Grayton. In this episode, Miriam Patton and I welcome an esteemed guest from the field of Shakespeare studies. My name is Ambreen Dadaboy. I am an assistant professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, and my research and teaching are in Shakespeare and the early modern period, and I focus on

representations of race and religion, particularly in plays that are set in the Mediterranean region. I'm really thinking about the Eastern Mediterranean and those moments of encounter with Islamic regimes, African regimes, and how those encounters are shaping early modern notions of what race is and also how Islam is coming to be constructed as a racialized religion, even as the English are looking at the Ottomans as an example of what a successful empire can be. In our conversation with Professor Dadaboy,

we'll discuss the ubiquitous portrayals of Muslims in the works of the Bard himself, as well as his contemporaries, to understand what they reveal about questions of race and views of the other in Europe before the modern period, along with their relevance for thinking through these issues today. Join us. Let's start by talking about the thing that sort of brings together your teaching and your research, which is this hashtag that you very devoutly use in all of your posts related to this subject, the Shake Race hashtag. Can you explain what this hashtag refers to? Is this a movement? Is this a, why do you use this hashtag? And what does it say about what's happening in Shakespeare studies and early modern literature with regard to the question of race?

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to plug hashtag Shake Race. I did not invent this hashtag, even though I use it quite a bit. It was invented by Kim or it was started by Kim F. Hall, who is a professor at Barnard. or it was started by Kim F. Hall, who is a professor at Barnard. And she started this hashtag in 2015 for a seminar that she was running for the Shakespeare Association that was on race. And she wanted to think about the shake part is, of course, talking about Shakespeare and thinking about how Shakespeare and race studies work together or race studies in Shakespeare. But it's also about shaking up race studies. So thinking about, for most people who work on race,

they think about race as being really something that is an 18th century and later kind of phenomenon. And she is really encouraging us, has been encouraging us for several years through her work to think in earlier periods. So there's like two things going on with Shake Race. But it's definitely a way for kind of like an activist movement online for people to share their work. So it's very collaborative. And it's also just a way to kind of flag moments in the early modern period that can be about Shakespeare, but also can't. You don't have to have a Shakespeare connection, but that are about sort of pre-modern and race. And I can imagine this could either be a very revolutionary center of the field sort of mainstream movement, or it could be the exact opposite, that this would be seen as a great departure from one of the more studied subjects in the field of English literature, certainly. How is Shake Race hashtag and the work around it shaking up the field of Shakespeare studies?

I think one of the things that Shake Race has been very successful in doing, and I have to plug Kim's book, Things of Darkness, because it came out in the mid-90s and it really gave us a pathway to think about the importance of race and just noticing color-coded discourse is also being racialized discourse particularly because of european expansion into africa in further east and all these areas where blackness becomes a way for them to understand themselves. And so her book came out in the 90s. And I mean, it has been cited over and over again, but it hasn't been positioned as kind of foundational in the field the way other work has.

And so really, Shake Race, it's not just about sort of uplifting Kim's work, which it should be, but it's about kind of telling us that we have all of these techs that have been around and doing the work, but they have been ignored and marginalized in a field that is very much invested in not seeing race. Race has been all around us and people have been talking about it for a really long time. And now that we have Twitter, we don't have to kind of be silent about the things that that we know and the things that we want to say. You know, why Shakespeare?

Can we is he still like why is he still such like the central pivoting figure around which literary theory and sort of post-colonial literary analysis still like is going back to Shakespeare. The easy answer for why Shakespeare is just the cultural capital, like we don't have to do any work to make the case for Shakespeare, like Shakespeare already makes the case for himself. And so attaching this kind of revolutionary work to a giant like Shakespeare just helps you to get a wider audience for the work that you're doing. You know, if I was talking about some minor playwright who didn't have many plays printed, but they were circulated in manuscript form. But it was amazing. But nobody would know this text. And so it was just, it wouldn't have the wide circulation. So really, for me, the idea is you use Shakespeare as my root and my anchor for me to then be able

to do the work, because people have already accepted that Shakespeare is worthwhile in some way. And I suppose for the topic of our interview today, another convenient aspect to Shakespeare's life is that his life happens to overlap with this moment in Ottoman history, a moment of great expansion and growth, dubbed sort of the golden age or the classical period. You know, Suleiman's nickname being the magnificent you know gives us air of sort of grandeur and and also you know danger towards Europeans so could you talk a bit about the ways of the Ottomans the Turks you know what's the difference between those two labels the ways they're depicted in not just Shakespeare but more generally in

theater and and popular cultural literature in this, and just some of the ways in which their religion, their race, starts to inform those perceptions or those perspectives of the Turks. In early modern English drama, we have this kind of stock figure of the stage Turk that shows up in lots of plays. I'm thinking about Tamburlaine, and we have Beyazit is there, and he becomes the footstool for Tamburlaine. And there's Solomon and Persida by Kidd, which is about Solomon's conquest of Rhodes.

But of course, there's the intervention in that play where Suleiman is killed while trying to conquer Rhodes. And so there's a kind of triumph, imagined triumph there with the literal real loss of Rhodes. The Fair Maid of the West is set in North Africa and you have Muslim characters and black characters. And so you have the figure of the Moor as Muslim, but also aligned with the Turk through costuming like turbans and scimitars and and just even phrasing. Right. They're always like, I swear by the scimitar or or I swear by Mahomet, and I swear by whatever. So those are

all ways that the drama kind of turns the Turk into this stock figure. And it's doing a lot of work, I think, in terms of presenting the power of the Ottomans, but also for its London audience, really domesticating the other, right? So in Suleiman and Persida, Suleiman is really brought down by his desire for this woman Persida, but also his kind of finicky collecting of male favorites, right? And so that he's not politically savvy in this way. And so it kind of gives, I think, the audience, it constructs for them an idea of the Turk as very capricious, childlike, easily ruled by their emotions. And so therefore, we can feel some kind of superiority over them because we wouldn't behave in this way. I'm also thinking of this really interesting moment that happens in Henry IV Part II when the old king has died and Hal, who will become Henry V, he ascends the throne. And when he ascends the throne, his brothers are there and he's like, don't, and I'm going to paraphrase really badly, but he says, don't be afraid that

I'm ascending the throne because this is not the way that, we are not in Turkey. And so it's not as though Amurat is succeeding in Amurat, but this is, you know, Henry succeeding Henry. And the comparison kind of fails because you do have this repetition of naming, right? So it is actually in this way, an Amurat succeeding an Amurat. But what he's promising them is, I'm not going to kill you all the way the Turks would kill you all. But there's always that sinister suggestion that's embedded in there. anxiety about the power of the Ottoman Empire to encroach into Europe and actually to take over culturally, politically, imperially, spaces that Europeans, like their own nations, like there is an actual fear that that could happen. In the examples that you studied in your research,

do these depictions of various moments in history of the Ottomans and the Turks, are they intended to be historical representations? You know, barring the fact that the details are changed here and there, or, you know, maybe this woman isn't actually, wasn't, you know, didn't exist, it's just a metaphor, a trope. Are these plays trying to present this as, you know, a historical kind of play in the same way that Shakespeare wrote histories versus tragedies and comedies? You know, they're not explicitly fictional. I think some of them are. So if I think about like Tamburlaine, I feel like that is something where we are getting the equivalent of a Shakespearean history play there. And that would be Marlowe, right? So not necessarily Shakespeare. But I think that there is the this powerful blurring between history and fiction to serve narrative.

Right. So even when I'm thinking about Shakespeare's history plays, right, they're all based on real things that happen in English history. constantly changing things around, removing characters, changing the order of events to serve the message of his play rather than to be very accurate historically. So I think that the drama is more looking at the Turk to fulfill a certain kind of affective function rather than kind of chronical history. But alongside the drama, then we have all of these books about the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, all of these print books that are English, so that if you don't speak Italian, for example, or German, then you can still access them and you can get these historical narratives. But those are also like high fantasy sometimes. Yeah, I was just struck by the example you gave of Amirath succeeding Amirath. And, you know, the audience would have had to really

understand what they were getting at, like the backstory of like Fatricide and the role of Fratricide in the Ottoman court, you know, without that backstory, that sort of background knowledge, would that line have made any sense? Probably not. We seem to be, you know, speaking about an audience or a sense of popular culture that was informed about Ottoman history. And so these plays could sort of, you know, move beyond just establishing the basic facts and story and move on to sort of metaphors and drawing out bigger narratives and sort of lessonsors and drawing out bigger narratives and sort of lessons and tropes about, you know, where's Europe stand in relation to the Ottomans? No, but I think you're absolutely right, especially with the fratricide thing. I think that

that really was something that I would argue helps to kind of racialize the Ottomans in terms of showing how barbaric they are in how they choose their rulers so they don't have this kind of order that that we do when we have our rulers except kind of forgetting about all the English Civil War the Wars of the Roses all of these things that came right before Henry the 7th and then Henry the 8th and then now we're in Elizabeth's reign and so we have somewhat of a stable government and the crown passing along a family line but the Ottomans are like the crown has been passed through the family line but then they have this other custom that kind of renders them so radically other like beyond the kinds of social familial bonds that the English and I guess other Europeans kind of hold on to as a sign of their civilization and kind of

Ottoman fratricide as a sign of Ottoman savagery. If you had to point to one Shakespeare play that most people know, for understanding race, the subject of race, it coded by religion, can be coded by color. However, however you want to think of it, what would that be and why? I mean, I guess I would just have to go to Othello. And this, I could choose any play of course, but I think that most people, when we think about race, we don't think about whiteness. And so we think about non-white bodies as the bodies that have race. And Othello is the play that has a lead character who is black, right? That is one of two plays where a

lead is black. The other one would be Antony and Cleopatra, which can be, people dispute Cleopatra's ethnicity, but in Shakespeare's play, it's very clear that Shakespeare intends for her to be black. So Othello would be my go-to. Also because like Othello's blackness has been contested by critics, especially since the 19th century, where there was a move to really orientalize and Arabize Othello on stage, I think in response to transatlantic slavery and plantation slavery. is made palatable by turning him into an Arab rather than having him be black.

And then again, the word more is doing so much work there to allow that ethnic change. And so that's an example of actually the meaning of race changing over the course from the time when Shakespeare originally wrote the play to the 19th century, that it's no longer acceptable to have this really leading figure be black. I think on the stage, on the English stage, that is correct. There are, you know, folks like Coleridge and Hazlitt, English literary critics and cultural critics, I guess we would call them, writing he had to have had in his mind an Arab and not a black man. I was reading a thread online that I suspect you were part of, but you know how Twitter is. It's there one moment and gone the next.

There was a thread going around about the Arabic translation of Otelo, some of the first Arabic translations, and that there too, that his race was obscured, that there's nothing about him being black. The conversation I saw was more about dynamics of race in the 19th and 20th century Middle East, but this could also be an artifact of the English transformation of the figure of Othello. Can you speak more about that at all? Yeah, I mean, I kind of missed that thread. Sadly, I'm always up for some kind of Othello thread where there could be some controversy. I mean, I think that Othello is, because he's the only character who is a Moor, there's a way that for those of us who belong to Islamic cultures, we can say, oh, look, Shakespeare wrote about us.

And so that, and again, this is about Shakespeare and his cultural capital and also about empire, also about like, why do we care all over the globe that Shakespeare wrote about us well we care because if we're part of the British empire at any point then then he was raised for us as the the best writer and thinker ever so I think that finding yourself in Shakespeare in whatever capacity is important. And so Othello's being Amour is a way that Arab cultures can access Shakespeare and think about how then Shakespeare is speaking for them. I would never want Othello to be speaking for me because, you know, he is the creation of a white man, Shakespeare. And it's very the play is very problematic. So it certainly wouldn't be my go to play for like here is a representation of my culture. think in terms of what you're talking about, even in Arab societies, we have not just colorism, but we also have racism and we also have anti-blackness. And so it's not surprising to me

that in the transformation of Othello within those cultures, you would have a kind of erasure of blackness. One of my favorite adaptations of this play is a book called Season of Migration to the North. And that is written in Arabic by Tayyab Saleh, who is Sudanese. And so there his Othello is Arab. And he's also black, his character Mustafa Saeed, who is this kind of Othello proxy. So I think it's a very interesting question, especially how cultures about whom Shakespeare seems to be writing deal with the problematic ways Shakespeare seems to write about us. Could we speak a little bit more about this sort of overlap between race and religion? And not just Othello but more generally I know

there's some debate over whether more necessarily automatically means Muslim why does it matter either way like you know what what kind of differences do we see in the character of Othello and Shakespeare if we don't take him for a Muslim if we do and similarly you know Arab versus black yeah that's a fantastic question right right? Race is not an essential thing, as we know, and it is something that is being formed. And it's a way to locate difference in these kinds of essentializing ways. So the discourse will always be incoherent. But what we see happening in the period is that through these kinds of encounters that are happening, increased trade, the kidnapping of Africans into bondage and slavery encounters are facilitating the need to kind of figure out how we are different from these people and to rationalize hierarchical relations that are going

to happen. And so the Moore and Muslim connection very much comes to England via Spain, right? And thinking about, right, even the modifier, like the Arab Moors who conquered Spain. What does that even mean? That certainly is an ethnic designation, but who else was in those armies and that society? We know there were many Black people who we might call sub-Saharan African people who were in those armies who were settled in Spain. And so that Moorish Spain was a religious designation that was also multi-ethnic and multi-racial. So all of that confusion, though, gets flattened out or complicated, however we want to look at it, through this term more that comes to signal for the English both racial

difference and religious difference. But then when they encounter people in Indonesia, they call them Moors. When they encounter people in India, they call them Moors. When they encounter people in India, they call them Moors. When they encounter people in North America, they call them Moors. And then we can think about the Indian and Indonesian example as being Tawny Moors or White Moors. They have all these signifiers that come in. So you have Blackamoor, you have Whitemoor, you have Tawnymo, so that you have an awareness of colorism, which is leading us into kind of a locating race in skin, all of these things are happening. But you also have religion, right? In Indonesia, for example, they were probably Muslims. And in India, they were probably Muslims too. And so that so that it is not just the color of their skin, but also their religious practice

that is getting folded into this term. And the function of this term is to signal difference. And so race and religion are, I think, working together all the time and religion is becoming racialized in order to exert this kind of power. And I would say that Turks on the stage are almost always, like I cannot even think of one instance where a Turk on a stage is not a Muslim. So Turk definitely for them means Muslim. And Turk gets labeled onto lots of non-Turks just to signal their infidelity, their betrayal, but also linking that to Islam. So another thing I want to ask is, you mentioned at the beginning that Shakespeare's time wasn't the time that people focused on in studying the history of race in Europe for a very long time. It was treated as a later development, and that we cannot

think of the categories that existed, even the category of race itself, during the early modern period as being consummate with later modern forms. And of course, there's a strong pushback, and that Shake Race hashtag is part of it. So how does pushing back that conversation into that early modern period, into the period before the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, for example, change how we think about the history of race? It's a big question. Let me see if I can answer it. Let me start with Shakespeare. I think that there has been a resistance to thinking about this in our field because there's a way that we want Shakespeare and this time period to be innocent from the kinds of degradations that we know happened because of

the transatlantic slave trade and how can we have this amazing author of the human condition right as bardolatry tells us live in a time that was implicated in these things. So it's been a lot of, I think, retroactive cleansing or whitewashing of the past that we've received, I think, through the Victorians. They've done a good service for white supremacy, but a bad service for historical accuracy. I think for the study of race, it's really important to look to the pre-modern because you can see already some of the ways in which the meanings of race are already being mobilized. And so we can go earlier than the early modern period. We can go into the Middle Ages and think about so many medieval romances are about these moments of encounters between Christians and Saracens and Moors and Moorish knights who marry fair women and then convert to Christianity and then their skin is lightened, right? These are all racial discourses that are giving us, they're telling us that the lightening of your skin that's related to Christianity is going to save you and it makes you better.

And so then your dark skin then is associated with non-Christian, associated with deviancy and sin. non-Christian, associated with deviancy and sin. So I think taking the long view of race is important because it kind of shows us how we get to the place where people can be enslaved in the numbers that they were and how the people who were doing the enslaving can be okay with dehumanizing other people in that way, right? It's already something that is floating around in your culture. So in other words, the slave trade did not create race, the modern slave trade did not create racism, but rather racism was a precondition of that particular form of

exploitation existing in the first place. Yes, I would agree. One of the interesting things that's been happening is that sort of parallel to what you all are doing in this scholarly field is that new adaptations of Shakespeare and these old dramas are being created and they're inserting a diverse cast of characters, maybe even beyond what existed in those plays, right? Just you can change the race of a character in a Shakespeare play within your performance or in a film. It's possible to do it. It's a drama. It's something that's very much part of how these kind of texts are being

reclaimed. I'm just curious about your thoughts on that. If that's something that you can read in parallel with this new study of the past, of Shakespeare's texts in that era, if there's a tension there, if you think that these new adaptations are somehow influenced by something that's happening in Shakespeare studies like I'm I'm just curious on sort of about what's what impressions you have of this trend I'm like a super fan of casting that is color conscious so like right the difference between colorblind casting and color conscious casting is that in colorblind casting we would just put people of color in various roles but they would were not necessarily paying attention to the racial realities of the actor and so the actor is then simply ventriloquizing a kind of white Shakespeare performance. Whereas color conscious casting

is paying attention to the racial identity of the actors and bringing that into the character so that you're not pretending to do Shakespeare right by doing it white, but you're actually doing, you're performing yourself, you're bringing your whole self into the performance. I'm thinking, for example, of The Publix. It must be two years ago now. So that would be like 2018, I think. And I know we're in 2021, but I'm still in 2020. But I think it was their 2018 performance of Much Ado About Nothing.

And it was an all-black cast and that was I think such a fantastic choice because you are there's a line in the play where Claudio and I can't remember if they cut it or not where Claudio spurns Hero he spurns her because he thinks she's been unfaithful and her her father says, you've fallen into a pit of ink, right? So you've metaphorically been blackened in this way. And then when we find out that she wasn't unfaithful, Claudio thinks she's dead, but he's going to marry her cousin. And he says, I would marry her even if she was an Ethiopian, right? So even if she was black, I would marry her because I want to make this restitution. And a lot of times we gloss over these moments when we see them because we're like,

oh, they were old fashioned. So maybe Shakespeare wasn't racist. But what it actually shows us is that how women's desirability is coded through and against blackness. And that that it's not just it is an accessible metaphor but it's common placeness kind of shows us how these ideas are circulating so in in that all black production you've kind of neutralized that a little bit but you also that that production also plays up song, dance, movement that is all specific to a culture. And so you really get a view into how Shakespeare can be made so much more interesting if we gave creative control to people who have other ways of being and engaging with Shakespeare. In Ottoman studies, where race is still catching up, I think the role of race in Ottoman studies has a lot further to go, the role of the chief black eunuch and sort of guarding the harem of women,

I couldn't help but think of that aspect of autumn history and was wondering if it ever gets mentioned in English dramas. So there's this play, I haven't seen it yet. Hopefully it's filmed, called Othello and the Seraglio, which is about Cymbal, the black eunuch. I'm not sure if he's like the chief black eunuch of the harem. But I think that there is certainly a lot of artistic interest around these figures. And I know Hamid Arvash, who's at UPenn, works a lot on Ottoman studies and Shakespeare and gender and sexuality. And so he has a fantastic article that is on

the figure of the eunuch and through like a queer studies kind of lens. But I mean, the English dramas were obsessed with eunuchs, dwarves, all of these things that they saw as kind of oddities of the empire, which I think did serve a kind of racializing purpose. And I'm not sure that they were aware of the intricacies of the fact that the black eunuchs guarded the women's portion of the harem, and then the white eunuchs obviously had other administrative duties and could rise quite high, which I think for me really does point out to point to a kind of anti-blackness within Ottoman society and culture. There's this pamphlet, I'm going to

blank on the name, but it's by Ottaviano Bon, and it's translated into English sometime in the mid-17th century. And he has a description of the order of the eunuchs and where they're assigned. And he talks about the black eunuchs guarding the sultan's wives. And he talks about black enslaved women who are, according to him, picked to serve the women, but they're picked according to how ugly they are. So the ugliest woman would be picked for this kind of service. So it's a very kind of weird moment, not just of kind of noticing race, but also associating beauty or lack of beauty with race. And like, I only work in English texts, and I don't have the Ottoman language to be able to work in the Ottoman archives, but I would be very interested in some like cross-cultural

collaboration. Because yeah, you're right, there is a lot of work to do. Yeah, that might be a good arena for collaborative work. And because, let's be honest, Ottoman studies and Middle East studies have been pretty resistant to talking about anti-blackness and forms of racism in the history because, you know, for various reasons, I think bringing in that more global perspective, bringing in Elizabethan England and looking at them side by side, a place where clearly there was an image of the quote-unquote Turk, could be a fruitful avenue. And I wanted to, you know, on that note, sort of think about another area of comparison, because you've been teaching in post 9-11 America,

and your work on Shakespeare is in conversation with the moment of like the war on terror and everything that has come with it, where in many ways, there's a lot of parallels, right? There's this, the idea of the Muslim threat, some of the Orientalist tropes that go back to the 16th century resurfaced in the pop culture as there was more fascination and fear surrounding the Islamic world. So in your classes, what are you doing with students to help them make the connections between that very formative time period in English culture, Anglophone culture, and sort of this moment that we've been in? Thank you for the huge question. I think it's so hard to really talk about the ways that we have as a society internalized so many of the logics of the war on terror, right? Something

that's going on 20 years now. And my students were either not born or babies when 9-11 happened. And so they have no living memory of that event. And their experience of the war on terror has just been that this isn't ongoing. Like it's been a conflict for their whole lives. The challenge for me is to really kind of expose how we make difference through these texts so that we can have the enemy that we need to do the thing that we want to do. And so it really helps for me to have literature as my field because we analyze texts, right? We analyze discourse and we get to see how these things work. So Shakespeare is always easy and convenient to go to. And Othello, too, is the only play, I think, that is explicitly seems to be engaged with the threat of the Islamic East, for example, to use all of the problematic language. Certainly, there are several other playwrights. And so if I was doing a course that's on the Mediterranean, I would go to plays like

The Renegado. I would go to The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, The Fair Maid of the West, several of these that kind of keep rehearsing the danger that Europeans face or Englishmen face. It's very rare that in the plays the characters will be English. They're usually Italian or Spanish or something. But the danger of the Mediterranean is the danger of cultural annihilation, where the threat of being turned into a Turk is very real and therefore you will betray everything that your culture stands for. And then we see the same kind of rhetoric mobilized in the war on terror where the radical Islamic fundamentalists, and again I use air quotes for this, are trying to take over and destroy our way of life and turn us into them. And, you know, women will have to

wear burqas and will be veiled and not have any of their freedoms. I mean, that's like Laura Bush in 2001 talking about these things. So there are really a lot of discursive parallels. And that just helps students, I think, understand how this conflict is not a historical conflict, but that we can always pick up this language, right? So it's not as though it's not a clash of civilizations. It's just that we have this language that we can access to turn it into something that is destined to happen. There's one other thing I thought of. Fairly early on in your teaching career, you taught at Boğaziçi University. What was it like doing this in Turkey, where all of these assumptions and categories and background are completely different?

Or maybe not, but what was it like? It was one of the best experiences of my life teaching at Bozici and just living in Turkey, having the experience of looking at this place, this geography that I had been studying more now as an insider rather than an outsider and just kind of reorienting myself so that I was looking not at East and West in the same way anymore, right? Like if we've all been to Istanbul and we hear it all the time, or we used to hear it all the time. I don't know if people still say it, but right. The only city in the world that's in Europe and Asia. Right. And so I think that really the the internalization of that belief that many Turks have,

Turks have, or at least the students that I had, was really a way for me to be able to access both their feelings about being Turkish and about kind of being European. So that they had, I think, a view, a global view that was obviously very different from the kind of view that we have in North America, which wasn't necessarily colonizing in the same way. Did you have any experiences with the Shakespeare text, though, dealing with this image of the Turk with students and then having them in this moment where Turkey's very place in Europe is one of the central political questions of the day? Unfortunately, I didn't because the Shakespeare

text that we did end up reading was Macbeth and not Othello, so I didn't get to choose. But what was really interesting, of course, when you teach Macbeth, for example, is that gender is so important because there's a way of just reading that play where you can blame everything on women, right? Lady Macbeth and the witches. And so having those conversations, that was really interesting. And I felt like my students were, I think, empowered to be honest in their reactions to like, yeah, of course it was her fault.

Like it says so right here, right? There's no other way of reading it. And so having, and then having a woman instructor kind of challenging them, not to say that like there were several women instructors there. And there were several people there at that time who were very anti allowing students to wear their headscarves to class. So it was a it was a strange moment. And seeing the fortress that you can see on that Met-Met build to cut the throat of the Bosphorus and conquer the city.

Someone told me that they had seen a performance of Othello in the fortress before it became too dangerous to have performances there. And she was like, it was just so fantastic to see it in this place and i i found it very interesting because it was that same impulse of um like arab people wanting to claim othello for their own right like you're the enemy in this play like turkey is not the you know the ottomans are not the good guys here but somehow shakespeare has and having ownership of that or seeing yourself in shakespeare even as a villain gives you some kind of like boost if i could chime in maybe to chris's question as a as a turk as a turk Turkish person who went to American schools, reading Shakespeare in high school, being very confused about all these references to Turks and

never really understanding them. You know, we didn't really talk about it in class. So it wasn't until I got sort of later in university, started researching, it's like, aha, okay, now I get it. And people, and I think teachers really gloss it over because we don't know, especially like if we're reading it in high school, or even even as an undergraduate there it's an uncomfortable moment of bigotry and xenophobia right so it's along the same lines as the really problematic references to jews these are all words that you swear by but these are people's identities and bringing that up in high school then or early college will make your students question how great Shakespeare is if he's using using these markers of ethnicity as a slur yeah I remember reading the merchant of venice in high school and a lot of students coming away

with the lesson that you wouldn't want them to come away with based on the portrayal of Jews in the play. So, yeah, I can imagine it's very challenging work to do this critique with people, but it's important work, right? Because it's excavating the accretion sort of of different kinds of prejudice and racism and othering, the accretion sort of of different kinds of prejudice and racism and othering. And even the way we other itself is kind of a trope that has to be like deconstructed. Like how do you construct someone as inferior or other identifying that as

like part of the process of, of going beyond it. So Shakespeare for that, for that reason, and for so many others seems very rich, and still very relevant, all these centuries later, all these books later, can always find something new. You know, just the thing about merchant study, they've done like audience studies where even the most kind of socially just performance of that show where you have a lot of intervention, maybe you're changing things, all of that audience members still come away feeling anti-Semitic because that's what this play encourages. So it's just it's just one of those plays that you can't. And here I'm citing Ayanna Thompson in her episode of Code Switch, where she says that maybe we should kind of retire performances of certain plays, which doesn't mean we're canceling them. Right. But

they're not really serving. They're not serving the communities that are being represented. Right. They're serving white supremacy. Well, hopefully in this interview, we've done our part to do the opposite and, you know, learn something about a totally new perspective on a very familiar topic, at least in American culture. Thanks for talking to us, Ambreen. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful. Thank you. That concludes our conversation with Ambreen Dadaboy. I hope you've enjoyed it. If you'd like to learn more about

today's topic, we've got a select bibliography on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, as well as a lot of other great episodes about the Ottoman Empire and the early modern world. I'm Chris Grayton. Thanks for listening, and join us next time. Thank you.