Comparing Frantz Fanon's The Tempest And Othello

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
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