Research Information System
Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English-Speaking World (IX) Theme: History Claims Everybody, Oradea, Romania, 28 March 2025, pp.10, (Summary Text)
Reclaiming the Canon: Voice, Memory, and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Desdemona
Toni Morrison’s Desdemona (2011) destabilises the authority of canonical literature by reimagining Shakespeare’s Othello through a postcolonial and feminist lens. This study examines how Morrison’s play subverts the silences of Shakespeare’s tragedy, centring such marginalised voices as Desdemona, her African nursemaid Barbary, and Emilia to criticise the Eurocentric and patriarchal frameworks of the original text. By resurrecting Barbary, a figure erased in Othello, and incorporating Malian musical traditions (composed by Rokia Traoré), Morrison bridges oral storytelling and institutionalised cultural narratives, challenging the exclusion of African diasporic histories from the Western canon. Furthermore, the play’s posthumous dialogue transforms Shakespeare’s tragedy into a site of reconciliation. It presents trauma, including colonial violence and the erasure of women’s voices, as a force that shapes collective memory and inspires resistance. Through Desdemona’s agency and Barbary’s presence, the play challenges the idea of the canon as a fixed record and instead portrays it as an evolving and disputed space. This study, therefore, contends that Desdemona represents counter-canonicity, a decolonial approach that reshapes established narratives, gives voice to the silenced, and examines how cultural memory is created, maintained, and changed.