SOURCE: Tsomondo, Thorell Porter. “Stage-Managing ‘Otherness’: The Function of Narrative in Othello.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32, no. 2 (June 1999): 1-25.

In the following essay, Tsomondo analyzes the narrative and dramatic strategies of Othello, concentrating on the construction of Othello as “Other” in terms of its implications within the play and for Shakespeare's canonical status in the postcolonial epoch.

New historicist and postcolonial research has lent to narratology's concern with voice and location of voice a heightened awareness of the sociopolitical as well as ideological functions of narrative discourse and the ways that literary texts inscribe and exploit these functions. In Hayden White's view, narrative is “not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events … but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications” (ix). More concretely, Foucault's Discipline and Punish...