Shakespeare and Transculturation: Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest

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. This chapter offers a theorization of what the author calls the “post-exotic” and its relation to the discourse of exoticism in contemporary cultural and postcolonial debates. It shows how Salih’s enactment of the West’s cult of the eroticized Moor generates a post-exotic narrative dystopia that disrupts the Orientalist economy of desire and derision, Self and Other, colonizer and colonized, and so on. The significance of Othello’s Moorishness in determining the play’s implication in colonialist ideology continues to be the object of scholarly investigation in the “postcolonial Shakespeare” debate. If anything, Sa’eed’s self-portrayal suggests an auto ethnographic masquerade in which an exotic native is performing his native dance to the “hankering” eyes of a metropolitan audience.