ABSTRACT
Ever since the publication of the First Folio in 1623, Shakespeare has been an inexhaustible source for playwrights, novelists, poets, scholars, translators, theatre directors, and Hollywood producers. From the early laudatory Restoration adaptations of his plays to the most recent and “radical” appropriations of them, Shakespeare has been a literary classic whose contemporary appropriative invocation reveals not so much the endurance of his universal genius as the modern appropriator’s current concerns. Postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare, for instance, involve less an attempt to do away with what Harold Bloom describes as the paralyzing grip of a gigantic literary precursor than an attempt to investigate profitably the otherwise infelicitous hiatuses in the Bard’s works. Such appropriations are not emulations of the Shakespeare text; rather, they are definitional reinscriptions of it. Postcolonial writers are radical traders in Shakespeare, and his text is often read in metonymical relation to a colonial kinship with which they are constantly grappling. By virtue of their bicultural situatedness, or what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation” (37), postcolonial writers attempt to revise, reconstruct, and negotiate images of ethnocultural alterity as represented in Western canonical texts. In this respect, postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare designate less derivative reproductions of the Western canon than revisionary, transformative articulations of its perceived fissures. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is an Arab-African novelistic appropriation of Othello that inquires into the dynamics of the Othello stereotype and its textual and sociocultural configuration in a colonizer–colonized paradigm. In Season of Migration, appropriating Shakespeare involves a twofold process: a deconstructive cultural resistance to the Renaissance master code of Moorishness and a constructive understanding of postcolonial history within a less antihumanistic perceptual mode. 1
