“I will not charm my tongue, I am bound to speak”: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona as an Expansion to the Interpretation of Othello

Toni Morrison’s Desdemona is a sort of prequel and sequel to Shakespeare’s Othello, a drama which includes Rokia Traoré, a Malian singer, and stage director Peter Sellars, which aims at giving voice and prominence to the women in the play with particular emphasis on the barely mentioned Barbary in Shakespeare’s work. The interest lies also in this hybrid reading which mixes adaptation, appropriation and intertextuality and lends itself to postcolonial studies and feminist criticism. The aim of this paper is to try to demonstrate how Morrison’s work sheds new light on Shakespeare’s tragedy amplifying possibilities of interpretation.