Roux, Daniel . “Hybridity, Othello and the Postcolonial Critics.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa .
Grahamstown: 2009. Vol. 21 pg. 23, 8 pgs
Full Text
(4618 words)
Copyright Institute for the Study of English in Africa 2009
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)
Something that strikes one about this way of understanding Othello as a character is that it affords him
a kind of ontological priority: he is read as if he is a black subject who has somehow stumbled into
Shakespeare's play. His predicament is read as analogous or somehow illustrative of the predicament of
the postcolonial subject. It is as if there is an organic flesh-and-blood person beneath the textual
imposition, a subject who invites a transformative face-to-face encounter, an electric shock of
recognition and kinship that enables the defamiliarisation of the colonial world that Shakespeare's play
anticipates but precedes. Othello's attempts to translate himself into a Venetian, his self-division and his
complex hybridity appear to hold a mirror to all the signal characteristics of the postcolonial subject, at
least in academic discourse. By now a venerable host of critics have warned sternly against projecting
our own language of race onto the Early Modern context, pointing to the fraught and ambiguous
situation of African nobility and diplomats in Elizabethan England, the collusion of a language of race
with a language of religion during this period, and the historically specific byzantine distinctions that
governed popular understanding of the Other. These Historicist correctives nonetheless still seem to
imply - in fact, they strengthen the sense - that the character Othello's history and culture somehow
reside intact in a kind of textual palimpsest: that a correct, attentive reading might somehow surface an
Othello that lives beyond the text even as he inhabits it, an Othello momentarily apprehended in history
by Shakespeare's play.
Of course, there is nothing new in responding to Othello as if its characters are real - perhaps testimony
to the brilliance with which Shakespeare explores and utilises the rhetoric of pity. Of all Shakespeare's
plays, Othello is most notorious for soliciting outbursts from the authence: sighs, exclamations, fainting
spells. Stendhal even reports that a soldier in Baltimore shot at the actor playing Othello in an 1822
production of the play and broke his arm after exclaiming, "It will never be said in my presence a
confounded Negro has killed a white woman" (Stendhal 3839). While postcolonial critics undoubtedly
adopt a more nuanced and sophisticated attitude towards the play's textual strategies than the soldier
in question, it is difficult to escape from the sense that there is an echo of this mimetic fallacy at work in
the kind of criticism that invokes Othello to talk about postcolonial subjectivity. Shakespeare was
undoubtedly attentive to the oppressive role of ideology, to the predicament of the outsider, to the
importance of narratives in mediating our experience of self and world. Perhaps he knew something
about the actual people called 'Moors' in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we
have been schooled, most notably by postcolonial theory itself, to de-emphasise these kinds of
questions, since they rest on untestable assumptions about authorial intention and experience. One
could answer that in Othello we encounter a dissection, or perhaps even an imposition, of a particular
ideological mechanism; but in the moment of identification with Othello as a victim of the mechanism,
or as in some way illustrative of the personal consequences of this mechanism, he becomes a real
person, or opens the textual space for a body - perhaps the body of the critic herself.
What I want to argue here is not that Othello should not be used by postcolonial critics. It is really that
the trend to read Othello's pain, self-division and volatility as the real consequences on a real person of
an inchoate colonial discourse calls into question certain assumptions of postcolonial theory. In this
sense, what I see as a misreading of Othello is really symptomatic in fact, it enables - one particular
understanding of the postcolonial subject that I think we need to interrogate very carefully. In this
sense, Othello remains an absolutely crucial text in postcolonial studies. I would argue that the play
engages narrowly with Early Modern humanism, with Renaissance constructions of an occidental,
individuated self, and that Othello's alienation and self-division, potently signaled by his blackness, is an
inexorable aspect of this process. Categories that seem so effortlessly to describe the predicament of
the postcolonial subject are in fact born out of Western self-definition: not, as the academic cliché goes,
by serving as its Other, but in fact as an absolutely integral aspect of self-definition, one of the
superimposed templates through which Western individuality has come to recognise and contemplate
itself. The self as split, hybridised, deracinated and alienated exists in a dialectical relationship with the
celebrated autonomous subject of humanism: they are one and the same thing. That is not to say that
these categories might not touch in very real and illuminating ways on the experience of
deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation and division that our postcolonial moment has produced. But the
central preoccupations of much postcolonial thought, including its semi-tragic celebration of plasticity,
self-translation, the fusion of boundaries and the translations that attend on travel and dislocation, have
a long history of involvement in specifically Western art and philosophy. They might not be inaccurate in
terms of describing postcolonial experience, but they belong to an epistemology that is really
preoccupied with the vicissitudes of the autonomous humanist self in the West: a point that Robert
Young makes about hybridity in a somewhat different context in his book Colonial Desire.
To be more specific, consider Christopher Marlowe's rather strange play Dido, Queen of Carthage,
written about 20 years before Shakespeare wrote Othello. Here we have Aeneas, the founder of Rome,
stranded in Africa, in a rather neat inversion of the cultural and racial dynamic of Othello. From the
outset, he seems inadequate to the mythical role that history has scripted for him: he faints at Queen
Dido's feet when she asks him to dinner and responds to even the simplest questions, such as "What
stranger art thou, that dost eye me thus?" (2.1.74), like a panic-stricken deconstructionist: "Sometime I
was a Trojan, mighty Queen;/But Troy is not; what shall I say I am?" (2.1.75-76) Throughout the play, he
fails properly to identify himself, to render any plausible account of his own actions, and is still described
in the last scene of the play by Dido as a "stranger" (5.1.285) - despite their love affair. When he
encounters a depiction of the battle of Troy, he seems to forget that he is in Carthage, has a weeping fit,
and to his friends' embarrassed discomfort wishes that he could be supplanted by the images that he
sees: to die so that they can live. In contrast, in Virgil's nationalistic Roman epic (which is of course
Marlowe's main source for the play), Aeneas feeds his spirit on the images of Troy that he finds in
Carthage: in fact, Virgil draws attention to the contrast between the inanimate nature of the depiction
and the vitality that the spirit finds in them (1.463-464). As I have pointed out elsewhere (Roux 39), for
Virgil, the representation, originally described as nova res oblata, a strange thing in Aeneas' s path,
becomes completely internalised: the symbolic representation of the past is fully owned by Aeneas, who
uses it to conceive of the possibility of a future. In De Man's words, we could say that he recognises in
the symbolic mode of analogical correspondences an organic world that he is still a part of (222).
Marlowe's Aeneas, however, sees only death and alienation in the past: if anything, he becomes the
nova res, the strange thing that drops out of the picture and now has no proper place in the world. In
Africa, the Other is Aeneas: the symbolic is an uncanny or 'unhomely' category that invokes the idea of
self and location even as it places these categories under erasure. When Dido admonishes Aeneas to
"remember who thou art" and to "speak like thyself (2.1.100), she is really asking him to identify with
the signifiers that precede his arrival, to speak like Virgil's Aeneas. But in this Elizabethan retelling,
Aeneas has gone missing. He has a name in the play, but the character seems inadequate to the name,
always in some sense in surplus or a deficit to the symbolic that he is supposed to inhabit. The
strangeness of the African shore serves really to dramatise Aeneas' estrangement from himself, his own
status as a homeless stranger, a stranger even to his own signifiers, the very name that is supposed to
carry Western civilisation.
This, I would argue, is precisely the space in which the humanist subject is born: in this failed repetition
of the past, a gap that opens in the classical world as it is re-told or re-imagined. Consider Pico Della
Mirandola' s famous answer to the question "why is man such a wonderful creature?":
[God] made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of
the world, said to him 'Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any
function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess
whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things
have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound,
may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature.'
(Cassiner 224-25)
The autonomous, self-authoring agent of Western humanism enjoys his power precisely because, in the
first instance, he has no true nature, no fixed place and no determinate function. To stand apart from
both nature and culture means that both world and language are sites of alienation; that the subject is
at best imperfectly translated into lived situations, infinitely malleable because no signifier can arrest
her subjectivity or bring it into full presence. There is a point of occlusion, a darkness where form
collapses, that represents the shadow-side of the Western subject. Renaissance playwrights were
fascinated by strangeness and Otherness at least partially because the autonomous self is predicated on
destitution and estrangement, because a kind of strangeness had emerged at the centre of selfdefinition.
Within Renaissance humanism, there is a busy engagement with the limits of humanism; a suspicion
that "man isn't entirely in man", to echo Lacan (72), that serves as a counterpoint to accounts of the
subject's uncircumscribed freedom. There is a strong philosophical tradition of skepticism in the
Renaissance concerning the power of reason - from Petrarch, who claimed that "... what a man knows is
nothing when compared ... with his own ignorance" (quoted in Cassiner 67), to Montaigne's
foregrounding of the limitations of reason and sense:
We have by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses formed one Verity, whereas
peradventure there was required the accord and consent of eight or ten senses, and their contribution,
to attaine a perspicuous insight of her, and see her in her true essence.
(Montaigne [B] 310)
In his discussion of Shakespeare's sonnets, Shakespeare 's Perjured Eye, Joel Fineman points out how
the Dark Lady sonnet sequence introduces a certain undecidability to the poet's subjectivity:
Instead of identifying himself with what is like himself, the poet instead identifies himself, not only with
what is unlike himself, but what is unlike itself- 'By self-example mayest thou be denied'. As a result, but
as a highly paradoxical result, no longer joined to a sameness which is the same as itself, the poet is
joined instead to an irreducible difference, to an essential otherness, whose power consists in the way it
thus disrupts the logic and erotics of unified identity and complimentary juncture.
(Fineman 22)
This finding of an "irreducible difference", both in the subject's identification with another and in the
other itself, this point of pure desire, marks a limitation internal and essential to Renaissance humanist
philosophy. Renaissance humanism is paradoxically split against itself, a celebration of the subject's
freedom from restrictions and an anxious series of returns to the boundaries of the subject. To be
absolutely clear, while this ambivalence plays a role in the erection of the 'self of humanist thought, it is
particularly visible in the Renaissance. As much as the equivocation is constitutive of the Western notion
of the autonomous self which emerges in the Early Modern period, it also threatens to undermine its
persuasive power, because the oscillation between a discourse of triumph and a discourse of frustration
undermines the idea of the 'self as a stable entity with a coherent purpose and specific formal
attributes. Lynn White points out that with the introduction of the idea of progress in the seventeenth
century, Renaissance humanism's self-reflexive reference to its own lack becomes restrained:
John Donne's lament for a vanishing order - ' 'Tis all in peeces, all cohearance gone' succumbed to the
vision of mankind's perfectibility. The idea of progress had vast therapeutic value because it enabled
most people to maintain personal psychic stability in the fece of an ever increasing cultural velocity. Its
advent marks the end of the Renaissance because it notably reduced the quantum of anxiety which had
been the most characteristic feature of Western society in that age.
(White 45-46)
In summary, the subject of humanism has a considerable investment in the unformed, the negative, the
unarticulated. Aeneas' s hysterical, passive distance from the forms in which he is represented is a
symptom of this investment.
The resonances with Othello are obvious: Othello is an alien in an alien world, precariously holding onto
an identity that is incessantly undercut by and eventually supplanted by a racist construction of what it
means to be a Moor. The play demonstrates both the power of the signifier and its arbitrariness. Our
sympathy for Othello is enjoined by precisely that sense that there is more to him than even his selfdescription would suggest, an ineffable tragic remainder that cannot be expressed but that is also the
repository of his humanity. Is this not exactly the illusion that many postcolonial critics of the play are
deceived by, and is this not the fundamental illusion that enables subjectivisation, the erection of the
autonomous self of humanism and the Enlightenment? In other words, despite the obvious
transformations of the idea of the "self since the Renaissance, the underpinning belief in a private,
agented self, in excess of its public roles, remains pivotal to the broad historical sweep that we have
termed "modernity".
In this sense, Desdemona's frequently discussed handkerchief serves to embody the gap between the
signifier and the world: Iago cleverly uses it to provide the kind of ocular 'evidence' that Othello requires
of Desdemona's unfaithfulness, dramatically demonstrating the contingent and constructed nature of
apparently self-evident reality. Othello's crime is that he mistakes the sign for the thing itself, and in the
process collapses his own identity into the signs that manufacture him as Moor: jealous, intemperate,
murderous, barbaric. The handkerchief, poised somewhere between the world of things and the world
of words, serves to link stories to reality even as it reminds the authence that the link is ultimately false,
that language opens up a gap, and that without the gap there is no subjectivity or autonomy.
In Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, Aeneas sails into history while Dido immolates herself on a pyre
made of his relics. In a sense, Aeneas rejoins Virgil's epic at this point, after his detour through the
English Renaissance: a return that is eloquently (and for some critics, puzzlingly) signaled by Dido's
adoption of Virgil's untranslated Latin lines in the closing scene. However, Marlowe's play returns
Aeneas to the world of classical antiquity with a typically Renaissance sense of undecidability, a
dissonance between the name and the referent that opens the space for the subject of modernity.
A broad range of readings of Othello produce a similar dissonance, which I am claiming is an essential
component of humanist thought. If we read the play as a narrative about an honorable soldier and
statesman who is overpowered by the semi-intemalised racist ideology of his time, then the suggestion
is that even a central and respected figure, in every way identified with the cosmopolitan values of the
Renaissance city state, is haunted by Otherness: he can never take his place in the symbolic for granted
because there is an excess to his subjectivity that constantly threatens to erase the public identity that
he performs: "a monster in his thought", to use Othello's own words, "too hideous to be shown"
(3.3:111-112). When Lodovico encounters the tormented Othello of the fourth act, he asks: "Is this the
noble Moor, whom our full senate/Call all in all sufficient?" (4.1:260-261), the answer is of course that it
is not - the noble Moor has been supplanted by an Other, he is divided against himself and alienated
from his symbolic identity. If, in contrast, we read the play as essentially a racist fantasy that claims even
a noble, Christian Moor will eventually succumb to the Elizabethan stereotypes that define and dismiss
blackness, then Othello's tragic grandeur and obvious victimisation interpose between the racist
nomination and its referent. It is entirely possible that the play simply returns Othello to his stereotype
in order to foreclose the possibility of black agency in a European world, but the return to the
stereotype is indelibly marked by a troubling excess and ambiguity, the possibility that Othello's
signifiers describe him even as they expunge him. In either reading, Othello is both more than and less
than the language in which he is couched; he is defined through a kind of surplus-deficit that is also at
the very heart of his prominent mutability.
In other words, Othello's Otherness really describes or invokes a sense of self-estrangement essential to
the humanist notion that the subject cannot be reduced to his place in culture or to the signifiers
through which she is made present to others. The so-called 'unified self of modernity is born in this
gesture of self-alienation, a kind of aesthetic and philosophic certainty that there is something in the self
that is more than or other than the self, a homeless, deracinated kernel that escapes all attempts to
name it and essentially places the subject on a profoundly individual and interiorised path. There can be
no fantasy of individual autonomy without such a concomitant fantasy of alienation from culture.
Moreover, the fantasy of alienation and estrangement is not in itself subversive of social orthodoxy, or
even at war with the notion of the unified subject.
In Radical Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore seems seduced by the idea that any critique of the plenitude and
coherence of the autonomous subject must be an act of subversion. Dollimore quotes from Montaigne's
first book of essays in order to show how Montaigne has an Althusserian understanding of ideology "as
so powerfully internalised in consciousness that it results in misrecognition" (Dollimore 17). For
instance, Montaigne writes: "The lawes of conscience, which we say to proceed from nature, rise and
proceed by custome" (quoted in Dollimore 17). According to Dollimore, Montaigne therefore displays a
radical understanding of how the subject is constructed in ideology; how the subject assumes as his own
the demands of the symbolic. However, in his chapter "Of Custome, and How a Received Law Should not
Easily be Changed", Montaigne follows his exposé of the insidious operation of custom with ruminations
on the virtue of following custom, and the dangers of challenging authority: "Those which attempt to
shake any Estate, are commonly the first overthrown by the fall of it" (Montaigne [A] 119). The man of
reason, while acknowledging society's faults and inadequacies, nonetheless behaves in a thoroughly
orthodox manner - his difference to society is a "private fantasie" (121):
[M] an ought inwardly to retire his minde from the common presse and hold the same liberty and power
to judge freely of all things, but for outward matters, he ought absolutely to follow the fashions and
forme customarily received.
(118)
In other words, the humanist subject maintains a sense of difference, of interior freedom, of
detachment from the social, by maintaining the social order. The gap, the fault, in which society loses its
'belonging to me' aspect, is visible only against the backdrop of orthodoxy. The lack in the symbolic is
visible only 'inside' the symbolic order; it is only from within the symbolic order itself that the subject
acquires its sublimated traumatic existence and thereby retroactively locates itself. The 'rational' subject
is constructed through the perception and maintenance of the 'lie' of custom, a point Dollimore seems
to avoid. Montaigne's argument for orthodoxy follows a circular route. The subject possesses a
subjective, rational freedom that exists independently from ideology, and is therefore in a position to
pose questions about ideology. Simultaneously, the subject finds a place in culture that is defined by the
very (ideological) signifier the private self is alienated from. Challenging the legitimacy of the signifier
one is attached to dissolves the peace and privacy that allows one the freedom to recognise the signifier
as alien ... Montaigne is, in other words, an advocate for passivity and a certain kind of conservatism.
To conclude, then: postcolonialism offers a convincing account of Othello in terms of selfestrangement,
hybridity, cultural translation and so on. However, we should entertain the possibility that Othello works
so well as a postcolonial text because postcolonialism draws so many of its terms and preoccupations
from a dialectical understanding of humanist subjectivity that became prominent in the Early Modern
moment in Europe. In other words, it is actually Othello that offers the reading of postcolonialism.
Again, postcolonialism' s deployment of its central tropes is not per se misleading or politically
ineffectual, in part at least because postcolonial predicaments are intimately entangled with Western
predicaments. But they are not new, nor are they specific to a 'non- Western' point of view, or even
powerfully at odds with Western notions of the subject as a stable, unified category. In fact, they need
to be translated to new epistemological contexts - which is perhaps why Achille Mbembe, to the dismay
of some critics, has dimissed what he calls "Foucauldian, neo-Gramscian paradigms" that "problematize
everything in terms of how identities are 'invented,' 'hybrid,' 'fluid,' and 'negotiated'" (5). Mbembe' s
own work evidences that he has in fact not rejected the notion of identity construction or plasticity. It is
the paradigm that is questioned: its apparently unassailable status in some postcolonial thinking and its
history of investiture in the same Western modes of thought that produced colonialism.
[Footnote]
NOTES
1. See Ben Okri's "Leaping out of Shakespeare's Terror" in A Way of Being Free (71-87). Okri concludes
that while Shakespeare's play opens a space for blackness on the English stage, Othello continues to be
"white underneath" (74).
2. Based on a reading and discussion with Caryl Phillips at "Try Freedom", a conference of the European
Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (EACLALS) in Venice in 2008.
3. See, for instance, Shakespeare and Race, edited by Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells, Ania
Loomba's Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism and Jonathan Burton's "A Most Wily Bird" in PostColonial
Shakespeares.
4. The incident is described in Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare, published in 1823. Wesley Bird notes,
however, that Stendhal might have invented, exaggerated or transposed the incident, because
Baltimore's two theatres were closed in August 1822 (Bird 118-119).
5. Steane, for instance, thinks Marlowe might have been in "too much of a hurry" (48); Levin feels
Marlowe is being evasive (33); while Gill proposes the rather unlikely possibility that Marlowe was
"modest" and "knew where he could not hope to excel" (153).
6. See, for instance, Jeremy Weate's "Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going beyond the Text".
[Reference]
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[Author Affiliation]
Daniel Roux is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch. His current
research focuses on writing from and about South African prisons. His interest in some of the current
debates in postcolonial theory led him back to Othello.
Indexing (document details)
Author(s): Daniel Roux
Author Affiliation: Daniel Roux is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch.
His current research focuses on writing from and about South African prisons. His interest in some of the
current debates in postcolonial theory led him back to Othello.
Document types: General Information
Publication title: Shakespeare in Southern Africa. Grahamstown: 2009. Vol. 21 pg. 23, 8 pgs
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