Othello revisited: Metropolitan romance in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

摘要

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”.