Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. – Mimi Yiu, assistant professor in the English department at Georgetown University, present her paper, “Othello’s Blackwork: Embroidering the Moor,” on Dec. 28 at the Modern Language Association annual convention, held this year in San Francisco.

Dissecting both symbolic and literal interpretations of Desdemona’s unmoored handkerchief, as described in William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Yiu aims to rectify a long-held critical color-blindness by examining both the discourse of mummy pigments in early modern art treatises and the fashion for blackwork embroidery designs derived from Moorish-Spanish origins.

Yiu suggest that while scholars have covered many pages in ink interpreting the “trifle” handkerchief’s strawberry print, less attention has be paid to the very ink that makes its strawberry design visible. In particular, Yiu suggests that while Shakespeare specifies that the handkerchief’s silk threads are “dyed in mummy” (III.iv.76), scholars have failed to recognize this seemingly exotic claim as a literal description of blackwork embroidery, a type of black-on-white needlework extremely popular during the Elizabethan period.

“If the handkerchief is a holy writ inscribing Desdemona’s virginity, what happens to conventional paradigms of race when, in this most intimate of tests, her white body, “a monument to alabaster” (V.ii.5), is found to bleed black blood?” asks Yiu. “What anxieties about Islamic foreignness underlie a strawberry design that bespeaks miscegenation: as an English fruit in a Moorish art, a domestic textile whose silk and dye come from Ottoman realms, a color scheme echoing that of a black ram tupping a white ewe?”

Yiu’s paper forms part of a larger project, tentatively titled “Early Modern Arabesques,” that examines how Islamic design and material culture entered early modern English culture, particularly as part of everyday domestic life. In addition to this chapter on blackwork embroidery, she is planning future chapters on knot gardens, mural painting, carpets, stage architecture, and glassware.

About the Modern Language Association

The Modern Language Association, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

About Georgetown University

Georgetown University is the oldest and largest Catholic and Jesuit university in America, founded in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll. Georgetown today is a major student-centered, international, research university offering respected undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar and around the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit www.georgetown.edu.