Good Cop, Bard Cop

This chapter collates materials from nineteenth-century Brazil and the antebellum United States to demonstrate how dissonant conceptions of interracial coupling have shaped the legacy of William Shakespeare&s;s Othello . Racial formations in the United States were historically geared toward the policing of an inviolable color line, whereas authorities in Imperial and early Republican Brazil advocated miscegenation to whiten and thereupon civilize a racialized underclass. This distinction is easily seen in Shakespearean adaptations touching on criminality and racialized policework. In a North American context, early progenitors of the crime beat invoked Othello to sensationalize local violations of anti-miscegenation statutes. Conversely, Lus Carlos Martins Pena&s;s The Jealous Officer (1845) renders parodic the vigilant policing of White reproductive futurity, inviting audiences to cheer for an imagined incursion into White domesticity. Yet in recasting Othello as a White police officer, Martins Pena&s;s farce points to the attenuations of Blackness at the heart of the Brazilian racial paradigm. Taken together, these materials reveal contrasting mechanisms of racialized control—one rooted in exclusion, the other in coercive incorporation.