Othello revisited

Metropolitan romance in Fanon'sBlack Skin, White Masksand Rushdie'sThe Satanic Verses

Bibliographic Data

ID2178439
AuthorsJoy Wang (0000-0001-7599-2313)
Year2009
Volume45
Issue1
Pages49-59
Publication date2009-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449850802636689
OpenAlexW2029828445
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited7

This article investigates the prevalence of the Othello myth in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. In particular, it focuses on the charged, pathological obsession with white women in both texts, and seeks to explain this representative tendency in male postcolonial writing as an historical repercussion of racial prejudice in the colony and the metropole. Fanon's controversial diagnosis of interracial desire in his essay "The Man of Colour and the White Woman" is illuminating with regard to Saladin Chamcha's acute racial identity crisis in The Satanic Verses. Chamcha's recovery from the self‐hatred induced by British institutional racism results in a revisionist corrective to the murderous and suicidal myth of Othello, and additionally presents a paradigmatic case of Fanon's prescription for the "liberation of the man of colour from himself". Keywords: FanonraceimmigrationOthelloromance Notes 1. I am using the term "black" as it has emerged in the context of "black Britain", a term widely circulated since the 1960s. I am aware that this is a contentious and potentially indiscriminate term; however, a historical analysis of race and racism in Britain necessarily forges a connection between Afro‐Caribbeans and Asians on the basis of shared exclusion, as in John Solomos's standard text on black Britain, Race and Racism in Britain (1992). 2. Lola Young, Kobena Mercer, and Rey Chow are among the most radical critics of Fanon's misogyny. Young argues that for Fanon, "the black woman desires but is not the object of desire since she has no status to confer on those who might want her" (100); Chow argues that Fanon's fanatical interest in community formation relegates black women's agency to a "gift to patriarchy" (55). 3. On the issue of Jean Veneuse's racial representativeness, Fanon is self‐contradictory. He says: "I contend that Jean Veneuse represents not an example of black–white relations, but a certain mode of behavior in a neurotic who by coincidence is black" (Black Skin 79). Yet he also argues that the purpose of his study is "to enable the man of color to understand, through specific examples, the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negroes" (79). 4. Fanon refutes the notion that French colonialism was distinguishable from other forms of oppression such as in South Africa and the United States. Trying to carve distinctions "in what way one kind of inhuman behavior differs from another kind of inhuman behavior" was, according to Fanon, like asking a Jew to note the difference between the anti‐Semitism of Maurras and Goebbels (86). 5. Paul's analysis is backed by many, including Linda Colley and Chris Waters, who observe that Britain's wartime sense of national unity against fascist Germany began to crumble after 1945, bringing to the forefront the fear of losing national cohesion. 6. Rushdie has defined "Chamcha" as someone who "sucks up to powerful people, a yes‐man, a sycophant". "The Empire", says Rushdie, "would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among the colonized people" ("Empire Writes Back"). 7. Aleid Fokkema argues that, in "learning to love, to forgive, and to mourn", Chamcha "exemplifies the limitations of a critical analysis based on a post‐structuralist concept of the subject" (62

Aesthetics · Art · Hatred · Identity (music · Literature · Mythology · Prejudice (legal term · Psychoanalysis · Racism · Romance · Sociology · White (mutation · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Social Psychology

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