Othello , Race, and Serial : The Ethics of a Shakespearean Cameo

Chapter 3 addresses subtle strategies for centring whiteness as it turns to NPR’s hit podcast Serial (2014), which invokes Othello as an interpretive lens. This chapter considers the importance of narrative framing through Joe Feagin’s concept of the white racial frame. The white racial frame not only shapes the covert, Iago-like focus on whiteness host Sarah Koenig undertakes in the series, but also informs how whiteness frames the topic of race in premodern studies by insisting on the fluidity of race in the Renaissance while ignoring it in modernity. Scholars can thus conveniently argue for the anachronism of studying race in the premodern. By using Serial to illustrate race’s fluidity in the modern era, the chapter prompts a reconsideration of the resistance to locating race in early modernity as well as a more nuanced understanding of how racial history shapes the present’s racial imaginary.