Hybridity, Othello and the Postcolonial Critics

Abstract

At least since Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was published in 1952, the postcolonial subject has been defined in relation to split subjectivity, hybridity and alienation. Academics and writers almost routinely invoke two ur-texts in order to discuss something of the problematics surrounding colonisation and the negotiation of race and Otherness: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Othello. In the case of Othello, there is often a visceral reaction to the black character on stage, a dislocating shock of recognition: thus for Ben Okri, it becomes possible to imagine himself in Othello’s place, Othered as much by the Venetian social context that the narrative describes as by the play’s own potentially racist symbolic. For Caryl Phillips, a personal comparison with Othello, both intimately inserted into and simultaneously alienated from the turbulent cosmopolitan centre of Early Modern Venice, is almost inescapable. In Othello, a generation of critics have recognised a trajectory described by Ania Loomba in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama:
Othello moves from being a colonized subject existing on the terms of white Venetian society and trying to internalize its ideology, towards being marginalized, outcast and alienated from it in every way, until he occupies its ‘true’ position as its other.
(48)