Celebrating Cultural Hybridity Through Storytelling: Othello as a Borderlands Character in Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood

This paper provides a new approach to Othello’s story in Caryl Phillips’ polyphonic novel The Nature of Blood (1997). The fictional Othello finds himself at the crossroads between different cultures and is struggling to define his identity. Making use of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory as exposed in her work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), this study explores Phillips’ Othello as a borderlands character. Accordingly, it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that, as a borderlands character-narrator, Othello succeeds in bringing together the two hitherto conflicting cultures that he knows (Africa and Venice) through storytelling. Indeed, his narrative proves a transborder testimony that contributes to creating a debate forum where cultural hybridity is celebrated.um where cultural hybridity is celebrated.

Black Travel Writing

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

“Shakespeare’s Pioneer Migrant Othello”: Desire, Migration, Pathology and the Politics of Citizenship in The Nature of Blood

In a historical period characterised by political and social occurrences of immigration crises, Shakespeare’s and early modern dramatic attention to aliens and foreigners invite us to re-read the anguish of Shakespeare’s alien and to investigate the ways in which, in the specific case of Othello, the Moor’s experience prefigures subsequent migrations and the contemporary immigrants’ struggle for integration. Caryl Phillips’ creative re-appropriation of Shakespeare’s Othello in The Nature of Blood (1998) gives voice to the psychological anguish of a migrant in the guise of an unnamed Othello-like black general newly arrived in Venice. In a never-ending dialogue between present and past, Phillips articulates a complex reflection on the immigrants’ desire to be granted recognition as a legitimised individual with a social identity, while problematising the idea of home and the sense of belonging, here understood as the subjective feeling of identification with a city/nation. With such a complex redefinition in mind, my reading conceptualises Othello (alias the migrant) as an ethnopsychiatric “symptom”, in a psychopathology of migration and exile which exposes the meanings and practices of belonging produced and supported by host societies.

Disrupted Parenthood in Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage

In his debut novel The Final Passage, first published in 1985, Caryl Phillips (dis)connects the English and the Caribbean spaces simultaneously imposing this inbetweenness onto his continuously misplaced characters. This paper explores the novel through the lens of disrupted parenthood, demonstrating that the ties between the family members mirror the inability of the protagonists to belong or to sustain relationships. By applying a postcolonial framework and including both canonical and recent texts produced in the field, this paper analyses how racial labels and assumptions weaken fragile bonds and further displace the characters as it also attempts to fill a gap since aspects of distress and breakdown are often neglected in literary criticism. Finally, given the background of the West Indies, the paper incorporates social and anthropological works dedicated to the region and connects Phillips’s narrative to the stories of migrants in contemporary Britain.