Orrore e meraviglia: la narrazione autobiografica di Othello in Desdemona di Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's Desdemona (2011) is a theatrical adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello that illuminates issues of race, gender and cultural hybridity from a peculiar African American perspective. This paper aims to investigate the ways in which Morrison's play draws on both early modern travel writing and African American autobiography in order to challenge prescriptive notions of blackness and whiteness. Morrison draws on a quintessentially African American literary genre and subverts its main rhetorical strategy – that is, sentimentalism – by injecting in it themes and tropes of early colonial discourse. She explores Othello's desire to partake in this discourse and to comply with its rhetorical rules in order to highlight slavery's power to fatally corrupt not only the morals of the slaveholders, but also those of the ex-slaves. The image Morrison gives of Othello contrasts either with the stereotypical noble savage or with the self-reliant slave who righteously triumphs over his morally reproachful master. In Desdemona, Othello is a pitiless soldier dominated by brutal instincts, who perpetrates atrocities, exactly as – and together with – his white comrades. The mutual pleasure that results from their shared crimes proves that, contrary to what happens in traditional African American autobiography, Othello's transition from slave to 'man', from servitude to 'freedom', is a controversial process that brings about misuse of power and a dangerous adherence to the degrading colonial logic of tyranny and possession. Morrison's reversal of sentimentalism compels readers and spectators to reject conventional binary oppositions such as black/white, good/evil, and victim/torturer

Chasing the Intangible: a Conversation on Theatre, Language, and Artistic Migrations with Irish Playwright Marina Carr

<p class="p1">Offally born Marina Carr is amongst the most prolific, influential and internationally renowned Irish playwrights of our times. Since her debut on the avant-garde side of the Dublin theatre scene in the late Eighties, she has had  seventeen plays professionally produced, both in and outside Ireland. Her earlier work is influenced by Samuel Beckett’s Absurdist drama, while in her most mature and recent plays she draws on both classical and Irish mythology, Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s poetics. In this interview, Marina Carr recalls and discusses some pivotal moments of her upbringing and career; she also speaks about language, landscape, dream</p

Desdemona di Toni Morrison e Rokia Traoré e il teatro della diaspora africana

&lt;p&gt;Desdemona (2012), a theatre adaptation of Othello with texts by African American writer Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré, has been interpreted as a feminist revision of the Shakespearean tragedy it springs from. Starting with a reflection on the transnational, transcultural and transmedial nature of its theatre pro- duction, whose staging involved artists from different geographical locations implicated in the phenomenon of the Black diaspora, this article moves on to discuss Desdemona as a work in which some dramaturgical and performance practices ascribable to radical and ma- terialist feminism coexist with themes, figures and forms of African diaspora theatre, a di- stinctively ritual artistic expression aimed at evoking the persistence of African spiritual and cultural retentions in Black diasporic communities. In Desdemona, the revision of Othello originates from the textual, visual and acoustic materialization of an African presence ma- nifesting itself through a black woman whose words, voice and body encourage a collective meditation on the material, symbolic, and aesthetic legacy of colonialism and slavery.&lt;/p&gt