Chapter 2 - Ethical Cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare’s Othello

Summary

Chapter 2 takes us through the dynamics of the interpellation of Othello’s blackness in the cosmopolitan contexts of Shakespeare’s Othello. The focus is on the effects of Iago’s modularity, that is to say, on his capacity to “make images” and to then use them as the means for eliciting strong emotional reactions from the other characters. I argue that Shakespeare’s inclusion in a book on postcolonial tragedy is guaranteed not because he is himself a postcolonial, but because his work has served to illuminate postcolonial conditions in different epochs and climes. One need only think of the impact The Tempest has had on arguments concerning the appropriation by the colonized of the colonial language itself as a tool to fight back, or the impact of The Merchant of Venice in illuminating the processes of endemic racism and anti-Semitism to be found in many societies today to see that Shakespeare is amenable to many postcolonial applications.