A Post-Colonial Critique of Othello

Time passes, class texts are read, dissected, deconstructed. Suddenly in the epochs of literary criticism, a new theory emerges. Schools of thought form and take shape and eventually find themselves in the subconscious of the reader, who now has the option of understanding his literature with a new interpretive strategy. One of the new schools of though, one that is slowly developing in the academic ichor, is post-colonial theory. The post-colonial method does not wade in the shallow-end. It is a discourse of marginalization; an examination of point-zero between the colonizer-colonized relationship; an upheaval of the delimited; a discovery, or unearthing, of the displaced. Time enough has passed: Shakespeare's Othello must face the possibly now of drowning in the deep end of this method, the possibility of post-colonial death above western eyes. This paper will explore the ways in which Othello represents the displaced Other - what Spivak calls the "subaltern" - the gyroscopic nature of his character, and the machinations of Venice that eventually destroy him.

The tragic in Othello echoes the Aristotelian caveat: "An imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself." Yet, for the subaltern Othello, Anouilh's Chorus in Antigone is more appropriate: "The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction." Othello's fall from grace goes unpurged, it is uncathartic, despite the dramatic finale:

Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Not set down aught in malice.
(V.ii.333-343)