“Shakespeare’s Pioneer Migrant Othello”: Desire, Migration, Pathology and the Politics of Citizenship in The Nature of Blood
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Chiara Battisti
Chiara Battisti is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona – Italy. Her research interests include intermediality, fashion studies, gender studies, disability studies, and law, literature and culture. Chiara Battisti is a member of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica), of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura) of CEMS (Centre for European Modernism Studies), of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) and of CUSVE.
Abstract
In a historical period characterised by political and social occurrences of immigration crises, Shakespeare’s and early modern dramatic attention to aliens and foreigners invite us to re-read the anguish of Shakespeare’s alien and to investigate the ways in which, in the specific case of Othello, the Moor’s experience prefigures subsequent migrations and the contemporary immigrants’ struggle for integration. Caryl Phillips’ creative re-appropriation of Shakespeare’s Othello in The Nature of Blood (1998) gives voice to the psychological anguish of a migrant in the guise of an unnamed Othello-like black general newly arrived in Venice. In a never-ending dialogue between present and past, Phillips articulates a complex reflection on the immigrants’ desire to be granted recognition as a legitimised individual with a social identity, while problematising the idea of home and the sense of belonging, here understood as the subjective feeling of identification with a city/nation. With such a complex redefinition in mind, my reading conceptualises Othello (alias the migrant) as an ethnopsychiatric “symptom”, in a psychopathology of migration and exile which exposes the meanings and practices of belonging produced and supported by host societies.
About the author
Chiara Battisti is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona – Italy. Her research interests include intermediality, fashion studies, gender studies, disability studies, and law, literature and culture. Chiara Battisti is a member of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica), of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura) of CEMS (Centre for European Modernism Studies), of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) and of CUSVE.
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- Introduction
- Introduction to the Focus Great Powers with No Responsibility?
- Focus: Great Powers with No Responsibility?
- The Casebook of Sir Edward Coke
- Taking Responsibility for the Pasts
- Faithful to the Wor(l)d. Visual Texts, Responsibility and the Issue of Translation
- “I Would Prefer Not To”: A Lawyer Facing the Irresponsible Power
- The Power without Responsibility of the Gaze. The Letter and Spirit’s Eye in the Humanities, from the Italian Perspective to the Robot
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- From Constitutional Transitions to the Great National Transition: A Constant and Obstinate Italian Narrative
- Who Watches the Watchmen? Law Diving into “Speaking Clouds”
- “Shakespeare’s Pioneer Migrant Othello”: Desire, Migration, Pathology and the Politics of Citizenship in The Nature of Blood
- Performing Identities in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Encounter with the Other Between Politics, Tourism, Migration and Culture in the Late Victorian Context
- Book Reviews
- Conor McCarthy: Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature
- Nicole Rogers: Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction to the Focus Great Powers with No Responsibility?
- Focus: Great Powers with No Responsibility?
- The Casebook of Sir Edward Coke
- Taking Responsibility for the Pasts
- Faithful to the Wor(l)d. Visual Texts, Responsibility and the Issue of Translation
- “I Would Prefer Not To”: A Lawyer Facing the Irresponsible Power
- The Power without Responsibility of the Gaze. The Letter and Spirit’s Eye in the Humanities, from the Italian Perspective to the Robot
- Research
- From Constitutional Transitions to the Great National Transition: A Constant and Obstinate Italian Narrative
- Who Watches the Watchmen? Law Diving into “Speaking Clouds”
- “Shakespeare’s Pioneer Migrant Othello”: Desire, Migration, Pathology and the Politics of Citizenship in The Nature of Blood
- Performing Identities in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Encounter with the Other Between Politics, Tourism, Migration and Culture in the Late Victorian Context
- Book Reviews
- Conor McCarthy: Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature
- Nicole Rogers: Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change
