Reclaiming the Canon: Voice, Memory, and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Desdemona
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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.
Author: Altın, Merve
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7132642406
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: