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Intercultural Allusion in TransculturalIdentity NarrativesJonathan P.A. Sell aa Universidad de Alcalá , SpainPublished online: 05 Jan 2009.

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Intercultural Allusion in TransculturalIdentity Narratives

Jonathan P.A. SellUniversidad de Alcala, Spain

This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the use of interculturalallusion in narratives of transcultural identity. Identity is taken to be narrative inperformance, one element of which, intercultural allusion, serves pragmatically tobroker the transcultured subject’s insertion into the host culture. The paper thenshows how Othello’s narratives of identity in Shakespeare’s tragedy are mimetic ofboth identity as performance and of the strategic deployment of interculturalallusion. The article concludes with a consideration of Caryl Phillips’s reaction to theOthello icon of exotic ethnicity in his meditative novel The Nature of Blood . Thisreaction forms part of Phillips’s own identity narrative and is illustrative of how areal person’s identity is also reliant upon allusion �/ often in spite of itself.

El presente trabajo trata de sugerir un marco teorico para el uso de la alusionintercultural en narrativas de identidad transcultural. Se considera que la identidades la interpretacion de una narrativa, un componente de la cual �/ la alusionintercultural �/ tiene la funcion pragmatica de negociar la admision del sujetotranscultural en la cultura de acogida. El trabajo procede a demostrar que lasnarrativas de identidad del Otelo shakespeariano mimetizan tanto la interpretacionde la identidad como el despliegue estrategico de la alusion intercultural. Por ultimo,el trabajo analiza como en su novela meditativa The Nature of Blood Caryl Phillipsreacciona ante el icono oteliano de la etnicidad exotica. Resulta que su reaccionforma parte de la narrativa de identidad del autor mismo, de tal manera que indicahasta que punto la identidad de una persona real se vale de la alusion �/ a menudomuy a pesar suyo.

Keywords: Caryl Phillips, intercultural allusion, identity narrative, Othello,Shakespeare

This paper is an attempt to sketch ways in which the intentional useof allusion assists in the construction of identity, particularly of culturallypalatable identities for transcultural subjects. Intertextual theory offers somesuggestive analogies between allusion and transcultural subjects. Firstly, asPlett (1991: 9) reports, allusion has been characterised as constituting an alienpresence in a text, an alien presence which is removable from the text, not anorganic part of it. If we substitute ‘transcultural subject’ for ‘allusion’ and ‘hostsociety’ for ‘text’, one analogy becomes immediately apparent and more thanslightly disconcerting, for the result of the substitution reads as follows: tomany the transcultural subject is an alien presence in a given host society, analien presence whose organic integration some might suspect and whoseremoval a few might desire. Intertextual theory even provides a terminologyin which those few might seek respectability for their desire: allusion is ‘animproprie -segment replacing a hypothetical proprie-segment’ (Plett, 1991: 9); it

1470-8477/04/01 029-10 $20.00/0 – 2004 J.P.A. SellLanguage and Intercultural Communication Vol. 4, No. 1&2, 2004

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is improper in that it does not belong genetically to the text it has been graftedonto, but has been parented elsewhere �/ is of a different blood. Thatimpropriety verges on the unethical in that allusion does the work that aputative genetically proper element could well have done �/ an argumentmore familiar from those who accuse immigrants of stealing the work ofnatives. Secondly, according to Riffaterre (1980), allusion is inherently dual, itsduality and therefore ambivalence stemming from its simultaneous sitednessin two different contexts, the quotation text (the text where the allusion ismade) and the pre-text (the text to which the allusion is made); and this dualsitedness problematises interpretation, for allusion refuses to commit itself toany referential allegiance to one context or the other. Here the analogy wouldbe with the ambivalent condition of the transcultural subject, who mayunabashedly declare, for example, dual sitedness by holding two passports �/

as does Caryl Phillips (St. Kitts and UK) (Bell, 1991: 593) �/ and whoseallegiances may be questioned by the likes of Norman Tebbit when caughtcheering on the wrong side at cricket. Thirdly, Hutcheon (1991) has pointedout how, in political terms, allusion has been viewed as fundamentallysubversive of representational canons and, more generally, of society at large.Similarly, the transcultural subject causes us to rethink our own self-representations before either expansively modifying or defensively reassertingthem, our modification or reassertion depending on whether we seetransculturality as an opportunity or threat to ourselves and to society at large.

But there is more than a relationship of analogy between allusion andtranscultural subjects, for allusion, more particularly intercultural allusion(that is to say, A’s allusion while addressing B to elements proper to theconceptual framework of B’s culture), may be used by such subjects toconstruct for themselves identity narratives which have the pragmatic goal,among others, of brokering their acceptance by the culture they happen to findthemselves in at any given time. When I talk about identity, or personalidentity, I am talking about the identity a person presents towards otherpeople. This presented identity is a construction or personal narrative, or a‘persona’ in the original sense of a theatrical mask. Tellingly, Goffman (1959:240), the social psychologist of the 1960s and 1970s, described his model of thepresentation of identity as ‘dramaturgical’: the process of establishing identityin society is a ‘performance’ or ‘dramatic realization’, conditioned by settingand audience, which an ‘actor’ executes to achieve some particular goals at agiven moment (Goffman, 1959: 17, 30); or, as Hobbes wrote as long ago as 1651,‘a person , is the same that an actor is, both on stage and in commonconversation’ (1996: 106). It is important to realise that no performed orpresented identity is coterminous with, or identical to, a person’s mostessential, irreducible, intimate and, so to speak, ‘real’ identity, if such a thingexists at all (something which Goffman would have denied). As Diski (2004:10) puts it, ‘we are actors or con artists. . . who walk into discrete situationalframes and become whatever will get us through’. Thus, we may deliberatelypresent different identities at different times, in different contexts, and todifferent people by, for example, switching dialects, idiolects and allusiveframes of reference, all of which are deictic of that sociocultural identity orpersona we wish to display in the particular context. Acceptance is won by

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establishing social and/or cultural parity between ourselves and our currentinterlocutors, a parity which is grounded in our positing a cultural frame ofreference which we assume our interlocutors share and to which our allusions,among other things, refer. This cultural frame of reference confers upon us asocial identity which we try to assimilate as far as possible to that of ourinterlocutors. To do so we play down some aspects of our identity and play upothers, and it is this pragmatic gauging of the identity we present to thecontext we are in which allows us to conceive of identity as a narrativeconstructed for the pragmatic purposes of social and cultural interaction andacceptance.1 And, as Goffman (1963: 42�/44) argued in Stigma , the pressure,the need to perform palatably, to produce acceptable identity narratives, topass oneself off as ‘normal’ is greater among those who are in some way oranother marginalised by noticeable disparity. This is why the identitynarratives of outsiders of any ilk negotiating admission into a society orculture are of particular interest.

One identity narrative which relies heavily on intercultural allusion and ispresented quite blatantly as a performance is Othello’s well known narrativeof identity in Act 1 Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Here Othello presents atranscultural persona for the benefit of the host culture, Venice, in whichhe wishes to site himself. Despite its familiarity, the narrative still bearsquoting:

Her [Desdemona’s] father loved me, oft invited me;Still questioned me the story of my lifeFrom year to year �/ the battles, sieges, fortunes,That I have passed.I ran it through, even from my boyish daysTo th’very moment that he bade me tell it;Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,Of moving accidents by flood and field;Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach;Of being taken by the insolent foeAnd sold to slavery; of my redemption thence,And portance in my travailous history;Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,It was my hint to speak �/ such was my process �/

And of the cannibals that each other eat,The Anthropophagi, and men whose headsDo grow beneath their shoulders. (Shakespeare, 2002: 1.3. 129�/146)

Culled from sources such as Pliny’s Historie of the World (in PhilemonHolland’s translation of 1601) and John Leo’s A Geographical Historie of Africa(in John Pory’s translation of 1600) (Honigmann, 2002: 5�/6), this narrative ispractically a summa of the commonplaces composing the other-image of theexotic with which Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar from thenumerous contemporary travel potboilers. Interestingly, there is no suchnarrative in Cinthio’s novela which provided Shakespeare with his mainsource. Cinthio (2002: 371), whose concern is to moralise not problematise,

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simply states that Desdemona, ‘impelled not by female appetite but by theMoor’s good qualities, fell in love with [Othello]’. So why does Shakespeareinterpolate this allusive narrative of identity?

It is a mistake to regard Othello’s narrative as underscoring his own exoticethnicity, for its intention and effect is just the reverse: his interculturalallusions are an attempt to present to Brabantio and Desdemona an identity ofsociocultural similarity by locking into the topical coordinates of the Venetian,or European, conceptual system’s scheme of the exotic, or more precisely, ofEuropean encounters with the exotic. To put it another way, Othello’s narrativeshows how he has come into contact with the exotic and codified orconceptualised his experiences of it in a manner proper to and thereforeadmissible by the host culture, in so far as his allusions are proper to thatculture’s conceptual framework as, in this case, inscribed in its literaryheterocosm. As a consequence, Othello’s use of intercultural allusion servespragmatically as a counter to bid for admission into and acceptance by thatculture. And Othello’s bid is successful: Desdemona falls in love with his tales;Brabantio laps them up, despite being, along with Iago, the only character inthe play who at times slips into racist discourse; and the Duke of Venicebelieves the ‘tale would win [his] daughter too’ (1.3.172). Othello’s competencein intercultural allusion has, for the time being at least, rendered him one ofthe Venetians (and by extension one of us) through his adept handling of theirand our topics of the exotic other. At the end of the scene the Duke mayremark to Brabantio that Othello ‘is far more fair than black’ (l.291); hisnarrative has washed his identity whiter than white.

All of this implies a measure of calculation on Othello’s part. He has gaugedhis persona with a weather eye and is fully conscious that this narrative is hisown self in performance behind an allusive mask.2 Greenblatt (1984: 238)suggests that ‘Othello comes dangerously close to recognizing his status as atext’; I would go further and say that here Shakespeare intuits the narrativityof identity and reproduces with great verisimilitude the process by whichpeople knowingly write or present their own identity narratives. We shouldnote that Shakespeare does not dramatise Othello’s tale-telling to Brabantioand Desdemona ‘live’, as it were; rather he makes Othello deliver himself of,and comment upon, an action replay of his tale, thus emphasising itsfactitiousness: removed from its original context of apparently ex temporedialogue, the narrative has become a recorded message and Othello himselfdraws attention to his ability to manage the telling of his ‘story’ (a word herepeats at ll.130, 159, 165), to fast-forward (‘run it through . . . to the verymoment’) and to play-back in slow motion (‘I would all my pilgrimage dilate’,l.154) according to the wishes of his hearers.3 And because Othello is not nowrunning through his tale to win the acceptance of Brabantio and Desdemona,the actor playing him may ham it up for the entertainment of the Duke,thereby emphasising for the audience the artificiality of this particularpresented identity and ironising on the ontological deficits inherent to alldiscourses of identity, which are essentially fictions, albeit at times powerfullypersuasive ones. In other words, Othello’s identity is overtly dramaturgical inGoffman’s sense.

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Towards the end of the play, just before stabbing himself, Othello’s use oflanguage becomes markedly interculturally allusive once more, but now therhetoric is under pressure from Othello’s resurgent exotic otherness. He bidsLodovico, Gratiano and Cassio:

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,Nor set down aught in malice. (5.2. 339�/341)

After thus giving voice to his awareness that identity, as narrative, issusceptible of diverse narrations, in this case, the extenuating and themalicious, Othello proceeds to dictate another identity narrative for Lodovicoto write down for the record in Venice. The narrative starts with a briefpsychological self-description (‘not easily jealous’ but easily misled whenworked up), which is amplified through a pair of extended similes. His hearersare to speak:

. . . of one whose hand,Like the base Indian, threw a pearl awayRicher than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,Albeit unused to the melting mood,Drops tears as fast as the Arabian treesTheir medicinal gum. (344�/349)

As before Othello alludes here to European (Plinian) commonplaces of theexotic, but their power to assert sociocultural similarity is undercut when hepositions himself on the side of the first simile’s exotic vehicle. For Othellodoes not compare his irrational, murderous disposal of Desdemona with theIndian who fecklessly squandered a pearl, as if his disposal and the Indian’ssquandering were two discreet actions. Rather he imagines that his own handhas actually carried out the action of the Indian: his own hand supplants theIndian as grammatical subject of ‘threw away a pearl’, as a consequence ofwhich a continuity of identity is asserted between the Indian and himself andhe becomes the Indian in the face of the European allusion �/ a rhetoricalrelocation reinforced lexically by the proximity of ‘tribe’. As for the Arabiangum-tree simile, Othello maintains more of a distance from the vehicle: hedrops ‘tears’ whereas the trees drop ‘gum’. Nevertheless, a logical nexus is stillforged between Othello and the exotic by the need to supply the verb ‘drop’ inorder to make good the ellipsis of the ‘Arabian trees’ predicate. Thus, the‘strangely bifurcated discourse’ (Boose, 1994: 40) of Othello’s final speechreveals his split identity: the intercultural allusions still attempt the presenta-tion of a persona that is palatable to the Venetians, but it is a persona which isslipping as Othello commences to resite himself in the exotic world evoked byhis rhetorical figures.

Next comes what F.R. Leavis (1962: 152) described as Othello’s ‘superb coupde theatre ’:

. . . Set you down this,And say besides that in Aleppo once,Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk

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Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,I took by th’ throat the circumcised dogAnd smote him �/ thus! (5.2. 349�/353)

Here Othello’s self-dramatisation unites his identity narrative and the real-time events of his life (or death) as his Venetian audience �/ and we, theaudience �/ watch him smite himself with his dagger at the very moment hesays the words ‘smote him �/ thus!’ This fusion of narrative and (the theatricalillusion of) reality persuades us that what we are seeing and getting at thispoint is the truth about Othello’s identity. So what is that truth? At first sightOthello’s account of how he took the side of Venice against another type of theexotic other, and consequently against his own originally other self, mightseem to be a definitive statement of how Othello genuinely believes himself tobe Venetian and to have manifested his allegiance to Venice by defending itsculture against the threat of the other. After all, on the point of killing himselfhe can no longer harbour any vested, pragmatic interest in disingenuouslyespousing a Venetian identity when he is about to cut himself off fromVenetian, and all, society for good. However, as we saw, the ‘base Indian’ andArabian gum-tree similes seemed to point to Othello’s irremediably ambiva-lent identity, and it is that ambivalence which is thrust upon the audience bythis fusion of narrative and action. For Othello is shown to be at one and thesame time the ‘turbanned Turk’ and his Venetian executioner: Othello theTurk, the exotic other, dies at the hands of Othello the Venetian. Thus his finalcoup de theatre enacts the centrifugal tensions that fraught the attainment of astable transcultural identity. Despite his familiarity with European allusiveframes of reference, despite his professed allegiance to the Venetian republic,the tragedy of Shakespeare’s Othello is that he ultimately remains a dual signwhose component of essential otherness it is Iago’s business to expose andexpunge (see Hunter, 1978: 45�/46).

For Caryl Phillips, of African, European, Indian and Jewish ancestry(Ledent, 2002: 7) and holder of St. Kitts and UK passports (Bell, 1991: 593),transculturality is more of a threat than a promising opportunity. Far frombeing a means to transcend differences of identity by subsuming them withina new and hybrid identity which, if unable to completely reconcile allthe tensions at conflict within it, is at least capacious and comprehensiveenough to make room for such diversity, Phillips seems to believe that thebottom line of transculturality is the transcultural subject’s abandonment ofhis or her culture of origin. Phillips and his Othello in his 1997 novel TheNature of Blood are of a melancholy humour, obsessed with �/ or weigheddown by �/ the guilt complexes associated with that abandonment neurosissyndrome suffered, according to Fanon, by all colonised subjects who achieveneither complete assimilation in the host culture nor complete eradication oftheir original cultural imprint.4 Besieged by this neurosis, in Loomba’s (1998:176) words, ‘the colonised subject realises that he can never attain thewhiteness he has been taught to desire, or shed the blackness he has learntto devalue’ �/ though Shakespeare’s Othello was fleetingly able to do so, as wehave just seen.

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In Phillips, gone are all traces of Shakespeare’s Othello’s ‘emotionalvolatility’, ‘sensuousness’, exaggerated Christianity and overdone rhetoric(the last two supposedly symptomatic of ‘cultural assimilation gone wrong’)which allegedly configure Othello as a prototype of ethnic and exoticotherness (all quotations from Honigman, 2002: 20�/28).5 Gone too is thetragedy and Othello’s heroic stature, for Phillips gives up his version of thestory on the eve of Othello’s departure for Cyprus (whither he shall gounaccompanied by his new bride). So what is Phillips’s point? Why allude toOthello at all? Naturally enough, as a character in a novel, Phillips’s Othello isnot formally dramatic. But more crucially, he is undramatic because he hasbeen condemned to exist in a solipsistic quarantine, sealed off from any socialinteraction. While this may be due to Phillips’s own belief that Shakespeare’sOthello’s tragedy was due to his lack of any supportive peer group whichmight have ‘reinforce[d] his own sense of identity’ (Phillips, 1992: 50), oneconsequence is that we never see him present a persona for the pragmaticpurposes of sociocultural insertion. In Phillips, the first identity narrative ofShakespeare’s Othello shrivels to a terse, dry precis: ‘the lady [unnamedthroughout, as is Phillips’s Othello himself] declared that she wished to knowprincipally of my adventures as a soldier and of the many dangers to whichmy life had been subjected. She listened intently, and I spun some truthfultales’ (Phillips, 1998: 133�/134). Here there is no exotic, no allusion, noperformance, no feeling of any transcultural identity being presented orsociocultural acceptance being negotiated. In fact, Phillips’s Othello, a new-comer to Venice, is more concerned to obtain information about Venetiancustoms from the lady than to capture her heart.

This concern is consonant with Phillips’s interest in arrival narratives, as hiscollection of such narratives, Extravagant Strangers (published in the same yearas The Nature of Blood) shows. The event of Othello’s arrival in Venice wastaken for granted by Shakespeare; but Phillips expends great energy upon itand at one point introduces a significant allusion: ‘During my return journey[from the house of the lady’s father] it began to snow. Tiny white flakes spundown from the dark sky and lightly dusted the gondola with a thin salty layer’(Phillips, 1998: 128). There seems to be a reference here to one extract inPhillips’s Extravagant Strangers , namely, The Interesting Narrative of the Life ofOlaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa the African, written by himself , first publishedin 1789. Among other English ‘wonders’ (Phillips, 1997: 11) Equiano recallshow ‘One morning when I got upon deck, I saw it covered all over with thesnow that fell over-night: as I had never seen any thing of the kind before, Ithought it was salt’ (p. 14). It would be tempting to deduce from Phillips’sapparent allusion to Equiano that he wishes to rewire Othello’s identitynarrative so that the current of a more authentic, black identity flows throughit. However, there is a key difference between Equiano and Phillips’s Othello:Equiano feels a sense of innocent wonder at the snow, which is only one in aseries of increasingly amazing English marvels; in contrast, wonder is totallyabsent from Phillips’s Othello. True enough, he repeatedly, wearingly uttersthe vocabulary of wonder (time and again he is ‘enchanted’, ‘overwhelmed’ or‘dumbfounded’ by the ‘strange’, ‘wondrous’, ‘spellbinding’ things of Venice),but he never seems to live it on his pulses and therefore fails to communicate it

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to the reader. In this respect Phillips’s Othello is quite distinct from Phillips’scollection of extravagant strangers, most of whom systematically registerfeelings of wonderment and convey them to the reader as they chart a courseof some kind from initial wonderment to the prompt disillusionmentattendant upon that familiarity which, if not contempt, at best breeds only agrudging acceptance. But Phillips’s allusion to Equiano only throws into reliefthe difference between his Othello �/ morose and inoculated against wonder �/

and Equiano and the rest. Phillips’s Othello is no extravagant stranger, aconclusion born out by Phillips’s further neglect to give him reactions orlanguage which might signal his difference.6

Phillips does, however, sketch for his Othello a new identity narrative, thepurpose of which is to give expression to the feeling of guilt attached to thetranscultural subject’s abandonment neurosis syndrome. Central to thatnarrative is the existence of a wife and child whom Othello has ‘left behindin [his] native country’ (Phillips, 1998: 135). To assuage his guilt Othello seeksconsolation in the fact that, as a warrior, the social mores of his country do notrequire of him any sort of formal marriage; but he never quite manages toconvince himself. Furthermore, his spirits lower when he reflects that ‘thisproposed marriage [to his Venetian lady] did indeed mark me off from mypast, and Venice, the birthplace of my wife, was a city that I might now have toconsider home . . .’ (p. 147). Ultimately, in his final appearance in the novel,Othello counsels himself to return home:

My friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal.Only the strongest spirit can hold both together. Only the most powerfulheart can endure the pulse of two such disparate life-forces. . . . Brother,you are weak. A figment of a Venetian imagination. While you still havetime, jump from her bed and fly away home. . . . No good can come fromyour foreign adventure. (Phillips, 1998: 183)

This is where Phillips abandons his Othello. A reader who knows nothingabout Shakespeare’s Othello would most likely assume that Phillips’s Othellowill return to his African home. And this may, indeed, be what Phillips wouldwish: if transculturality depends on rewriting the self as a figment of theVenetian imagination, as Shakespeare’s Othello did so ably early on in theplay, it is better to avoid the dangers implicit in sociocultural ambivalence andyield to whichever culture exerts the stronger pull.7 For Phillips’s Othello it isobvious which culture is stronger and yet Phillips himself is unable to writehis Othello back home. If we consider the novel as an identity narrative of itsauthor, we can see how Phillips is powerless to reroute the flow of his novel’sprincipal allusive pre-text, just as no reader familiar with Shakespeare’s playcan forget its tragic outcome and imagine (in the silence left by Phillips) ahappy African homecoming for Phillips’s Othello. Phillips is able neither to‘erase’ nor to ‘dismantle’ the European mythology of the exotic other astypified in the Othello figure (pace Ledent, 2002: 140); all he can do is abandona figure which, as a figment of the Venetian imagination, does not really servehis avowed interests. The narrative impasse which this abandonment inscribesis ironically indicative of Phillip’s own ambivalent identity. For The Nature ofBlood is a novel which ‘foregrounds the writer’s European sensitivity’ (Ledent,

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2002: 137) and as such is a further instalment in the identity narrative of anauthor who, despite once having characterised himself a ‘a black man living inEurope’ (Phillips, 1992: 54) is more essentially �/ and not just circumstantially�/ European than that description might suggest: no figment of the Venetianimagination, Phillips is a Venetian imaginer himself.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Dr Jonathan P.A. Sell,

Universidad de Alcala, Spain (jonathan.sell@uah.es).

Notes1. See Sell (2004) for a fuller discussion of this point.2. F.R. Leavis (1962: 142) says that ‘a habit of self-approving, self-dramatisation is an

essential element in Othello’s make-up’. I would nuance Leavis’s observation andmake of that ‘self-dramatisation’ ‘an essential element in Shakespeare’s representationof Othello’s make-up’: ‘self-dramatisation’ is characteristic of all humans, as Iexplained earlier; what Shakespeare does in Othello is foreground it.

3. Othello’s self-conscious manipulation of generic commonplaces is enhanced if theFolio reading ‘traveler’s history’ is adopted in place of ‘travailous history’, asGreenblatt notes (1984: 237).

4. The figure of Othello has been a constant, if ghostly, presence in much of Phillips’sprevious fiction; Othello lurks in the African collaborator with the English slaversin ‘Heartland’ (Higher Ground , 1989), in Cambridge (Cambridge , 1991), and in NashWilliams in ‘The Pagan Coast’ (Crossing the River, 1993) (see Galvan, 2004). But thefigure is fleshed out and made explicit for the first time in The Nature of Blood .

5. In fact, none of these characteristics is unique to Othello. Within the play we mightcompare Emilia’s olfactory sensitivity to villainy (5.2.188) or Cassio’s inflatedrhetoric (e.g. 1.2.39�/47); outside the play parallels are legion. What might beunique is their combination which, in conjunction with suitable make-up andcostume, renders Othello so recognisably other, even if he cannot be confidentlyassigned any particular racial or national identity.

6. In regard of language, in this novel at least there is none of Phillips’s alleged‘ventriloquism’ (Lezard, 1993: 21): all the characters seem to speak the samelanguage. It might also be noted how Othello purveys what is often considered tobe the typically western, white, male discourse of colonialism in so far as he viewsboth Venice and his Venetian lady as beautiful, dormant women, vulnerable to hisgaze and touch.

7. At the same time, by omitting Othello’s suicide, Phillips (1992: 51) spares him whathe has called a ‘European death’.

References

Bell, C.R. (1991) Worlds within. An interview with Caryl Phillips. Callaloo 14 (3), 578�/

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