『오셿�로㿒�왿� 우리 시대의 인종과 인종주의: 카릴 필립스의 『피의 본성』과 자넷 시어스의 『할렘 듀엣』 (Othello, Race, Racism in Our Time: Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet)

In recent decades, Shakespeare’s Othello has been “well on the way to replacing The Tempest as a favored field of debate and contention” for the scholars and writers in the field of postcolonial studies and this interesting shift is related to the growing importance of racial and ethnic tensions within First World societies. Othello is an exotic outsider, licensed “to move freely about the metropolitan First World” and isolated from other black people. Thus, Othello, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, prefigures the hybridity and the double consciousness postcolonial theorists have identified in postcolonial subjects and is now widely studied and appropriated to explore the difference race makes within a contemporary diasporic context. This article aims to read Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997) and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet (1997), in which Phillips and Sears as themselves contemporary Othellos embodying Black diaspora history in their bodies, explore the possibility of articulating postcolonial subjects through rewriting of Othello. The focus is on the difference in their idea of what constitutes the identity of postcolonial diasporic subject and its relation to the debates in postcolonial studies.

In recent decades, Shakespeare’s Othello has been “well on the way to replacing The Tempest as a favored field of debate and contention” for the scholars and writers in the field of postcolonial studies and this interesting shift is related to the growing importance of racial and ethnic tensions within First World societies. Othello is an exotic outsider, licensed “to move freely about the metropolitan First World” and isolated from other black people. Thus, Othello, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, prefigures the hybridity and the double consciousness postcolonial theorists have identified in postcolonial subjects and is now widely studied and appropriated to explore the difference race makes within a contemporary diasporic context. This article aims to read Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997) and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet (1997), in which Phillips and Sears as themselves contemporary Othellos embodying Black diaspora history in their bodies, explore the possibility of articulating postcolonial subjects through rewriting of Othello. The focus is on the difference in their idea of what constitutes the identity of postcolonial diasporic subject and its relation to the debates in postcolonial studies.