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At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s Othello became a site of tension as the previously uncontested blackness of the titular hero sat uneasily with critics, actors, and audiences under the sway of contemporary racial politics, science, and philosophy. In this paper, I explore that historical moment and how the visual and emotional impact of a black Othello on stage led to Edmund Kean’s groundbreaking “tawny” Othello. I argue that a whitened Othello is the result of affective anxiety and that this Romantic rejection of the affective power of blackness gave birth to a tradition that even today limits the roles black bodies can assume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads a recurrent motif of Hogg’s fiction—the unnatural—in relation to the “organic” cultural science propounded by some of Hogg’s contemporaries. For many Romantic commentators, social organizations like the rustic community, the ethnic group, and the nation bore the imprint of a symbiotic relationship between laws in ethnography and those of organic life. Hogg’s writing evokes scenarios in which such laws lose durability and fail to generate connections between land and community, self and other. In these moments, Hogg evokes the incongruous and fragmentary qualities of a native cultural experience, an otherness often erased from more dominant ethnographic and aesthetic depictions of Scotland’s cultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]