Shakespeare’s Post-Colonial Legacy: The Case of Othello
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Maria Löschnigg
Abstract
Post-colonial rewritings of European classics have been categorized either as texts which perpetuate colonial structures, or as ‘canonical counterdiscourses’, which stand in clear opposition to the source text. Appropriations of Shakespeare, in particular, have been the target of such polarized readings, which all seem to be based on the assumption that literary texts are fixed discourses. In my essay I shall try to counter the narrow post-colonial conceptualisation of the counter-discourse by taking a closer look at Othello-rewritings, with a special focus on African Murray Carlin’s play Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. As will be illustrated, Carlin’s text, just like so many other Shakespeare rewritings, draws on the ambiguities inherent in the pre-text, in order to engage in a dialogue with the Renaissance tragedy and activate its relevancies for modern post-colonial societies in a global context. The article thus proposes a new approach to Shakespeare rewritings, one that considers the pretexts’ polyvalence and one that exchanges notions of counter-discursivity with notions of textual and cultural reciprocity.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- ‘What Would Happen If We Were No Longer Able to Narrate?’ Dystopian Speculations and Other Reflections on the Relevance of Narratives for Human Life
- Shakespeare’s Post-Colonial Legacy: The Case of Othello
- Sympathy Control: Sentimental Politics and Early European Aesthetics
- Rufmordangst und Rufmordlust im Komödienspiel: Richard Brinsley Sheridans The School for Scandal und Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest
- Leni Riefenstahl und Susan Sontag: Gibt es im Sport eine faschistische Ästhetik?
- Migration and the Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
- J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Dog-Man’ and the Cynicism of Disgrace
- Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös & Udo Fries. News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis
- Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). Historical Pragmatics
- Manfred Markus, Yoko Iyeiri, Reinhard Heuberger & Emil Chamson (eds.). Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: A Multi-dimensional Approach
- Boel Jepson. English Place-Name Elements Relating to Boundaries
- Michael P. Barnes. Runes: A Handbook
- David Clark & Kate McClune (eds.). Blood, Sex, Malory: Essays on the Morte Darthur
- Rebecca Brackmann. The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English
- Helen Cooper. Shakespeare and the Medieval World. The Arden Critical Companions
- Fred Schurink (ed.). Tudor Translation. Early Modern Literature in History
- Sabine Nunius. Coping with Difference: New Approaches in the Contemporary British Novel (2000–2006)
- Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer & Aleks Sierz (eds.). The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights
- Marina Grishakova & Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). Intermediality and Storytelling
- Jan Kucharzewski. Propositions about Life/Reengaging Literature and Science
- Joseph L. Coulombe. Reading Native American Literature
- Michael Basseler & Ansgar Nünning (eds.). A History of the American Short Story
- Books Reveived
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- ‘What Would Happen If We Were No Longer Able to Narrate?’ Dystopian Speculations and Other Reflections on the Relevance of Narratives for Human Life
- Shakespeare’s Post-Colonial Legacy: The Case of Othello
- Sympathy Control: Sentimental Politics and Early European Aesthetics
- Rufmordangst und Rufmordlust im Komödienspiel: Richard Brinsley Sheridans The School for Scandal und Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest
- Leni Riefenstahl und Susan Sontag: Gibt es im Sport eine faschistische Ästhetik?
- Migration and the Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
- J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Dog-Man’ and the Cynicism of Disgrace
- Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös & Udo Fries. News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis
- Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). Historical Pragmatics
- Manfred Markus, Yoko Iyeiri, Reinhard Heuberger & Emil Chamson (eds.). Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: A Multi-dimensional Approach
- Boel Jepson. English Place-Name Elements Relating to Boundaries
- Michael P. Barnes. Runes: A Handbook
- David Clark & Kate McClune (eds.). Blood, Sex, Malory: Essays on the Morte Darthur
- Rebecca Brackmann. The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English
- Helen Cooper. Shakespeare and the Medieval World. The Arden Critical Companions
- Fred Schurink (ed.). Tudor Translation. Early Modern Literature in History
- Sabine Nunius. Coping with Difference: New Approaches in the Contemporary British Novel (2000–2006)
- Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer & Aleks Sierz (eds.). The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights
- Marina Grishakova & Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). Intermediality and Storytelling
- Jan Kucharzewski. Propositions about Life/Reengaging Literature and Science
- Joseph L. Coulombe. Reading Native American Literature
- Michael Basseler & Ansgar Nünning (eds.). A History of the American Short Story
- Books Reveived
