Epilogue: Imperialism’s Legacy, or the “Language of the Criminal”

Abstract

Tdramatic construction of the “erring barbarian” takes place within an international Renaissance context so strikingly new and transformative as to serve as the modern prototype for cross-cultural exchange, interaction, and immigration. “Geographers, historians, merchants, or moralizing churchmen,” write Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh, “were all part of the movement of European exploration and ‘discovery’ from the fifteenth century onwards, setting into motion a process of globalization and transculturation that is still with us today” (1). The historical and practical value of understanding the Othello syndrome of desired assimilation allows for an extended meditation on the means and consequences of acculturation, a complex emotional, social, and political process raised at the close of chapter four and the focus of chapter five. Othello’s strategy of belonging within Europe, what I have examined as his performance of cultural whiteness, can be subjected to Frantz Fanon ’s critique over naively adopting, or surrendering to, the prescriptions of the dominant group within a colonial paradigm: “At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country” (Fanon 1990: 180). At the same time, an alternate Shakespearean pattern of protest and resistance offered by Aaron and Caliban anticipate Fanon’s radical consideration in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) of the separation of the native intellectual from every level of the colonial machinery.