Sabine Schülting (Brighton)

Bringing "this monstrous birth to the world's light":
Colonial mimicry in early modern writing

In The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, Walter Raleigh relates an encounter with the natives of Trinidad:

[...] by my Indian interpreter, which I caried out of England, I made them vnderstand that I was the seruant of a Queene, who was the great Casique of the north, and a virgin, and had more Casiqui vnder her then there were trees in their Iland: that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyrannie and oppression, and that she deliuered all such nations about her, as were by them oppressed, and hauing freed all the coast of the northren world from their seruitude had sent me to free them also, and with al to defend the countrey of Guiana from their inuasion and conquest. I shewed them her maiesties picture which they so admired and honored, as it had beene easie to haue brought them Idolatrous thereof.1

Not only Walter Raleigh but also Thomas Hariot and Francis Fletcher tell stories of colonial encounters in which the Native Americans seem to adopt Christian and European culture without being able to fully grasp its 'essence'. Similar to Shakespeare's Othello, who is simultaneously constructed as the 'noble Moor' and the 'lascivious Moor', they, too, oscillate between the Same and the Other, thus reinforcing the colonial discourse and, at the same time, subverting it. In my essay, I will describe these phenomena using Homi Bhabha's term "colonial mimicry", which he defines as "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite."4 "Almost the same, but not quite" - my assumption is that Homi Bhabha's dictum, which refers to the paradoxical economy of post-Enlightenment colonial discourse, can also be applied to some effects of early modern colonial writing. However, instead of postulating a general continuity of colonial discourse from the sixteenth century up to the present, I will try to discuss these phenomena in their historical context and show that early modern colonial mimicry is related to the circulation of signs, bodies and commodities.

In 1585, Thomas Hariot, mathematician and astronomer, accompanied Richard Grenville to Virginia. In his Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, which he published soon after having returned to England, he recounts an episode which resembles Raleigh's story. In Hariot's text, it is European technology that is displayed to the Native Americans. They are not a little impressed:

Most thinges they sawe with vs, as Mathematicall instruments, sea compasses, the vertue of the loadstone in drawing yron, a perspectiue glasse whereby was shewed manie strange sightes, burning glasses, wilde-fire woorkes, gunnes, bookes, writing and reading, spring clocks that seem to goe of themselues, and manie other thinges that wee had, were so straunge vnto them, and so farre exceeded their capacities to comprehend the reason and meanes how they should be made and done, that they thought they were rather the works of gods then of men, or at the leastwise they had bin giuen and taught vs of the gods.5

An "almost the same but not quite", that is, partial conversion or colonization, is the result of this policy. Being convinced that the 'divine' knowledge which they strive for is materially contained in the Bible, the natives of Virginia literally try to devour the book:

And although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of anie such vertue, as I thought they did conceiue, but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke ouer all their bodie with it; to shewe their hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.7

However, there is more to this episode, since once again it must have reminded late sixteenth-century readers of Catholicism. Hariot's attitude is clearly Protestant and recalls the highlighting of the Word while bestowing a merely representational character to the Eucharist. The Native Americans' "hungry desire" for the Bible, which they want to absorb and devour, evokes the Catholic belief in the transubstantiation of the wafer into the body of Jesus Christ, which the Protestants attacked as cannibalistic. "These signes considered nakedly in and by themselues", William Bradshaw, an English Protestant with Puritan affiliations, writes about the Eucharist in 1609, "are not of any great force to stirre vp any great reuerence to the ordinary then eating of bread, and drinking of wine."9 Hariot's effort to stop the natives cherishing the Bible - "And although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of anie such vertue" - even anticipates the wording of Bradshaw's Direction for the Weaker Sort of Christians.

Although the Native Americans, as they are constructed in these texts, seem to accept and adopt European signs and science, their 'conversion' is nearly always inappropriate. They either ignore the representational character of the things they see (the picture of Queen Elizabeth) or bestow a supernatural quality to the products of European technology. In short, they are associated with fetishism, which, as William Pietz shows, developed as a (European) concept in the cross-cultural encounters between West African societies and Portuguese merchants in the fifteenth century. Pietz's anthropological discussion of fetishism does not regard the fetish as a form of worship which was indigenous to the African cultures. Instead, he argues that the concept of the fetish, which was later adopted and modified by Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, had its origin in cultural difference, that is, the European effort to come to terms with the alienness of African culture. Interestingly, Pietz demonstrates that in early modern travel accounts the attacks against fetishism as a 'pagan' form of worship, the norms of an emerging mercantilist economy, and the pride in European technology are all causally related to each other:

the alleged false religious values of African fetish worshipers were understood to cause the Africans' false economic valuation of material objects. Superstitious delusion (and its exploitation by wily, self-interested fetish priests) was seen to block natural reason and rational market activity. And this superstitious mentality was in turn explained through anecdotes illustrating the Africans' alleged propensity to personify European technological objects.10

Stephen Greenblatt discusses the early modern conflict in the understanding of the Eucharist as a debate about the status of the sign. In his words, the change effected by Protestantism is a transmutation from "meat to metonymy" or from "est" to "significat"13. For the Protestants, the consecrated wafer has ceased to be Christ's body, but represents it. This links the religious controversy to a larger historical development, the reorganization of European thought between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault illustrates that until the sixteenth century the sign and what it indicated were connected by resemblances so that there was no point in differentiating "between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth [...] and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books"14. When, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, this organisation of knowledge was disrupted, words and things lost their connection and became separated. The sign now represented the thing and, consequently, told of identities and differences. Language provided the basis for the differentiation between man as analysing subject and the world as his object.15 According to Michel de Certeau, the modern subject was born because the cosmos lost its organizing structure, the Word of God:

When the speaker's identity was certain ("God speaks in the world"), attention was directed toward the deciphering of his statements, the "mysteries" of the world. [...] The disappearance of the First Speaker creates the problem of communication, that is, of a language that has to be made and not just heard and understood. [...] In other words, it is because he loses his position that the individual comes into being as a subject. The place a cosmological language formerly assigned to him and which was understood as a "vocation" and a placement in the order of the world, becomes a "nothing," a sort of void, which drives the subject to make himself the master of space and to set himself as a producer of writing. [...] The mastery of language guarantees and isolates a new power, a "bourgeois" power, that of making history and fabricating languages.16

In relating early modern Europe's concept of language to the hierarchy between Robinson and Friday in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Certeau emphasizes the inextricable link between the organization of writing and colonialism. The 'New World' poses the problem of the 'void' in a disturbingly new way because neither the Bible nor the Ancients ever mentioned America and the Native Americans. Here, text has to be produced rather than read, interpreted or reproduced. This is particularly true of an account by Francis Fletcher who accompanied Francis Drake on his voyage around the world (1577-80). On the south-western coast of North America they are confronted with women who are tearing the flesh from their cheeks and violently throwing themselves down on the ground. At a loss how to make sense of this performance, Drake and his men react with their own show:

This bloudie sacrifice (against our wils) beeing thus performed, our Generall with his companie in the presence of those strangers fell to prayers: and by signes in lifting vp our eyes and hands to heauen, signified vnto them, that that God whom we did serue, and whom they ought to worship, was aboue [...]. In the time of which prayers, singing of Psalmes, and reading of certaine Chapters in the Bible, they sate very attentiuely [...]. Yea they tooke such pleasure in our singing of Psalmes, that whensoeuer they resorted to vs, their first request was commonly this, Gnaáh, by which they intreated that we would sing.18

Fletcher's and Hariot's travelogues show how the Europeans' loss of words and 'the Word' in the 'New World' is projected to the Native Americans. Fetishism not only identifies them as the heathen Others of (Protestant) Europe, but, moreover, is the reverse of early modern signifying practice. It simultaneously contains the 'loss' of the Sacred Text and marks the beginning of a new economy of writing. The production of language in and about the 'New World', its dissemination and inscription on the body of the Other was one of the central means of establishing and consolidating colonial power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.19 Eden's First Three English Books on America (1511-1555) disclose the violence of this writing (on) the body of the Other:

"For lyke as rased or vnpaynted tables, are apte to receaue what formes soo euer are fyrst drawen theron by the hande of the paynter, euen soo these naked and simple people, doo soone receaue the customes of owre Religion, and by conuersation with owre men, shake of theyr fierce and natiue barbarousnes."20

Although human beings were considered to be liable to corruption, they could never really lose that attribute which made them human, that is, the rational soul. "After the Incarnation all men were salvageable in principle, and this meant that whatever the state of physical degeneracy into which a man fell, the soul remained in a state of potential grace."24 Accordingly, the human body was not understood as the basis but the consequence of this specific spiritual or social status, as the example of blacks clearly demonstrates. In the early modern age skin colour was generally explained as the effect of the irradiation of the sun.

As regards the blacks, however, another paradigm was consulted. Classical aestheticism provided a symbolic reading of colour, to which, in Christianity, a religious interpretation was added.25 With reference to the Book of Genesis, the black Africans were regarded as the descendants of Ham, Noah's son, who saw his father when he was lying in his tent, drunk and stark naked. When Ham told his brothers, they, instead, averted their eyes and covered Noah's nakedness. As a punishment for his lack of respect, Ham was cursed and, according to the dominant interpretation, punished with black progeny. In the Hebrew language, this association of black skin colour with sin pervaded even etymology.

They [Ham's descendants] must [...] have been black, since, through etymological conflation, the Hebrews ran together word roots used to indicate the color black, the land of Egypt (i.e., of bondage), the land of Canaan (i.e., of pagan idolatry), the condition of accursedness (and, ironically, apparently the notion of fertility), with the proper name of Ham and its adjectival variations. 26

Ham is the biblical figure traditionally understood as the progenitor of the 'black' nation. Blackness, that is race, as an operative category, becomes a further means of drawing the boundaries between permitted and forbidden sexuality. Ham is condemned because he looked upon his father's nakedness. His gaze rested upon the genitalia of his father, upon the origin of his progeneration but also the mirror of his own sexual identity. 27

In the early modern age, blackness was thus regarded as both the sign of and the punishment for Ham's sinfulness. But this also means that skin colour was not (yet) an unchangeable 'racial characteristic', but was read instead as a signifier of the spiritual state of the people. Hence it follows that according to a widely-held belief it was considered possible "to wash the Ethiops white" if they only returned to God, to remove blackness as the sign of sin by baptism.28 In a secularized version, this opinion also informs Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness (1605). Here, blackness is discussed as an aesthetic (and not religious) category. The 'Daughters of the Niger' appear on stage searching for the land of Britannia, where, as they have been told, they are to lose their 'ugly' skin colour.

BRITANNIA (whose new name makes all tongues sing)
Might be a Diamond worthy to inchase it,
Rul'd by a SVNNE that to this height doth grace it:
Whose beames shine day, and night, and are of force
To blanch an AETHIOPE, and reuiue a Cor's.29

My initial examples from early modern travelogues disclose the conflicting economy of language, the changing concepts of the sign and of writing, in the 'New World'. In contrast to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial discourse, early modern mimicry was not effected by the simultaneous workings of "the synchronic panoptical vision of domination - the demand for identity, stasis - and the counterpressure of the diachrony of history - change, difference"30. The early modern age did not understand history as an all-embracing concept of the 'origin', causal development and inevitable historical nature of each and every thing and event. It therefore makes sense to discuss colonial mimicry in early modern texts primarily in terms of language and writing. The essentially material character of the fetish is obviously incompatible with the early modern understanding of the representational quality of the sign. However, as I have tried to show, the 'offering' of the English monarchy as well as Christianity is only accepted by the Native Americans when European representations are distorted and converted into fetishes. The phenomenon of mimicry, the "almost the same but not quite" of the colonial subjects, links European economy to its own subversion. In the words of Homi Bhabha: "the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference."31 A reading of William Shakespeare's Othello will show how the working of this ambivalence finally turns "from mimicry - a difference that is almost nothing but not quite - to menace - a difference that is almost total but not quite." 32

Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,
For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy curled [darlings] of our nation,
Would ever have, t' incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou - to fear, not to delight! (I.ii.63-71)33

That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it,
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies [...]." (III.iv.55-63)

meaningful fixation of a singular event; it is above all a "historical" object, the enduring material form and force of an unrepeatable event. This object is "territorialized" in material space (an earthly matrix), whether in the form of a geographical locality, a marked site on the surface of the human body, or a medium of inscription or configuration defined by some portable or wearable thing. The historical object is territorialized in the form of a "reificatition" [...]. This reified, territorialized historical object is also "personalized" in the sense that beyond its status as a collective social object it evokes an intensely personal response from individuals. 34

And she did gratify his [Cassio's] amorous works
With that recognizance and pledge of love
Which I first gave her. I saw it in his hand;
It was a handkerchief; an antique token
My father gave my mother. (V.ii.213-217)

Othello's contradictory stories of the origin of the handkerchief describe a change from fetish to sign. They can be related to his defence in Act I, the story of how he initially wooed Desdemona:

I spoke of most disastrous chances:
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes i' th' imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my [travel's] history;
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, [and] hills whose [heads] touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak - such was my process -
And of the Cannibals that each [other] eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
[Do grow] beneath their shoulders. (I.iii.134-145)

Othello doesn't lose "his own origins;" his only access to those origins are the exotic ascriptions of European colonial discourse. Othello's stories of slavery and adventure are precisely a rehearsal of his origins, from his exotic tales of monstrous races to the story of the handkerchief's genealogy in witchcraft and Sybilline prophecy. [...] His successful courtship of Desdemona suggests that those origins are not simply repressive, but also enabling. 40

In re-reading Othello against the background of twentieth-century African adaptations of the text, Jyotsna Singh repudiates traditional 'white' interpretations of the play that either try to repress Othello's blackness45 or simply equate the categories of 'woman' and 'black man'. She maintains that those re-writings remind

us that Africans, Turks, Moors, among others, recognize Shakespeare's Othello as a "character" in a familiar, Orientalist landscape, both erotic and violent, a composite fantasy of the Europeans' "colonial harem". As readers and viewers, they are drawn into both an identification with and disavowal of the Moor: living as "mimic men," they recognize that Othello's claims to any identity - either as a "savage" or as a Christian and tragic hero - are tenuous and derivative. 46

Self-fashioning and the early modern economy of language could thus be employed for the colonial project, but as colonial mimicry and mockery they could likewise develop into a threat for Eurocentrism. This became evident in Spain, where, in 1492, the Jewish population was expelled or forcefully converted. Neither Jewish nor Muslim conversos, the moriscos, were fully accepted as Christian citizens. Even before the moriscos were 'driven out' between 1609 and 1614, limpieza de sangre- ("purity of blood") statutes barred the former Jews and Muslims from any public offices in politics, administration, religion, and education. From this moment onwards, Christian identity was no longer defined by baptism but was related to the body, to 'blood', in the sense of

having no admixture of the races of Moors, Jews, heretics, or penitenciados (those condemned by the Inquisition). According to this doctrine, non-Christian religious faith ceased to be a question of choice and was transformed into an inherent stain - inherited through "blood" and therefore indelible.48

In order to master this insecurity, the body, 'racial' characteristics or, as in Spain, 'purity of blood' come into play. Othello is referred to as "the thick-lips" (I.i.66), "an old black ram" (I.i.88), or "a Barbary horse" (I.i.111-112). In these allusions to Othello's corporality, which is associated with sexuality and bestiality, the relationship between the body and cultural identity has undergone a decisive change. Whereas until the early modern age skin colour had been read as an indicator of one's spiritual or religious identity, it had now become the basis of social status. Accordingly, Brabantio complains that "if such actions may have passage free, / Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be." (I.ii.98-99) Just as the moriscos and the converted Jews were excluded from higher social ranks by the liempieza de sangre-rules, Othello is also shut out from at least one important sphere of Venetian society. Interestingly, however, it is not his military position which is questioned. Iago tries to 'blacken' Othello's reputation because Othello has claimed participation in the exchange of women. In contrast to Karen Newman, who like others reads Brabantio's disapproval of the couple as the fear of 'miscegenation'49, I want to discuss it in economic terms which can be related to my initial remarks on the fetish and early modern signifying practices.

When Iago and Roderigo wake Brabantio in the middle of the night, they do not warn him of 'miscegenation' but of theft: "Awake! what ho, Brabantio! thieves, thieves! / Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!" (I.i.78-80) Iago's speech reveals the early modern conceptualization of women as a "property category", the homology between the female body and the threshold of the house.50 In the eyes of the law, the woman is owned by her father or her husband and, furthermore, she is the representation of his property. Her exchange between men, from father to husband, equals an economic transaction and her defence against other men the protection against theft. Accordingly, since the enactment of a law under the reign of Henry VII in 1486, rape has been punishable as an offence against the father's or husband's property. Brabantio's accusation therefore is to be read literally: "O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my daughter?" (I.ii.62) In the presence of the Duke, he, once again, complains of Desdemona being "abus'd, stol'n from me, and corrupted" (I.iii.60). Abuse and corruption do not mean 'miscegenation' but rape, which means theft, since by deflowering the woman the rapist lessens her value on the marriage market.

If one defines capitalism "as the mode of production which, in fetishizing the commodity, fails to fetishize the object"51, the reification of Desdemona can be discussed as an aspect of capitalist commodity fetishism. She is fetishized because she is regarded as valuable property, as Brabantio's "jewel" (I.iii.195). In trying to prevent the marriage between her and Othello, Brabantio does not want to withhold his daughter from exchange in general. On the contrary, he deplores her being "[s]o opposite to marriage that she shunn'd / The wealthy curled [darlings] of our nation" (I.ii.66-67). Yet, he does not accept Othello as the appropriate partner in this exchange. In contrast to the Native Americans, Othello does not fetishize objects but is fully aware of their exchange value in speech and trade. He submits to the capitalist economy of signs and commodities, which also includes the exchange of women, but in doing so he becomes a competitor who aspires towards white male prerogatives. Although in the end, Brabantio gives Desdemona away, he emphasizes that he is forced to do so against his will: "Come hither, Moor: / I here do give thee that with all my heart / Which but thou hast already, with all my heart / I would keep from thee" (I.iii.192-195). He has to 'transfer' Desdemona because she is already irrevocably lost to him. Yet, this symbolic act is the public and legal acknowledgement of the marriage.

For Brabantio, however, being 'robbed' of his daughter, Desdemona's "match was mortal" (V.ii.205). His death discloses that "[w]hite Racism has been, from its origin, a story about male competition. Thus the black male, imputed competitor for possession of the white male's prerogatives of power, wealth, and the assumed ownership of white females, poses the threat that marks the space where projected racial anathema begins."52 This fear is based on the phantasm of a male parthenogenesis which, in procreation, needs the female body only as the passive vessel. In other words, since the "the female parent's seed is less powerful, less 'informing' than the male parent's"53, cultural signs can only be passed on to the children by the man. This explains why a marriage between a Native American woman and an English man, such as the famous couple Pocahontas and John Rolfe, was not regarded as a threat to European superiority whereas the reversed constellation definitely was. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, for example, the conflict between Prospero and Caliban is structured around this phobia:

Prospero: [...] thou did'st seek to violate

The honor of my child.
Caliban: O ho, O ho, would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans. (I.ii.347-351)

In contrast to Caliban, Othello succeeds in getting a Christian woman. Brabantio's formal acceptance of the marriage includes him in Venetian society while, simultaneously, his death denies this affiliation. Othello's mimicry has become a 'menace' for Venetian patriarchy. In a way, Iago shares Brabantio's fear. His motive to intrigue against Othello is his envy of Cassio, to which in Act I, scene iii, he adds a further aspect: "I hate the Moor, / And it is thought abroad that 'twixt my sheets / [H'as] done my office. I know not if't be true / But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, / Will do as it for surety." (I.iii.386-90) Shortly afterwards, he repeats this suspicion:

I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap'd into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth (like a poisonous mineral) gnaw my inwards;
And nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am even'd with him, wife for wife [...]. (II.i.295-299)

Othello's mimicry, his in-between position, although enabling, finally leads to Desdemona's murder and his own suicide. In the end, Iago succeeds in instilling in Othello a deep distrust in Desdemona's faithfulness by convincing him of his Otherness and the 'unnaturalness' of their marriage.54 In his discussion with Iago, Othello's identification with the Venetian soldiers against the Turks as the Others (cf. II.iii.170) is disrupted. He begins to reflect on "nature erring from itself" (III.iii.227) and to consider his skin colour: "Haply, for I am black, / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have, or for I am declin'd / Into the vale of years (yet that's not much), / She's gone." (III.iii.263-267) In taking for granted (linguistic) signs without realizing that they might not mean what they pretend to, he finally falls victim to the same order of language that had at first enabled him and helped him to win Desdemona. His being discursively constructed as the Other, which initially produced Desdemona's desire, has become the cause for his distrust in her.

Othello's belief in signs becomes fatal when he can be convinced that Desdemona has given away the handkerchief. When Iago objects that "being hers, / She may, I think, bestow't on any man" (IV.i.12-13), Othello replies, "She is protectress of her honor too; / May she give that?" (IV.i.14-15), thus denying her access to exchange relations. While Othello's self-fashioning as a subject of Venetian society depended on being accepted as a partner in economic and symbolic exchange, Desdemona's entrance 'on the market place' would make her a prostitute. The handkerchief which passes from one to another clearly evokes this phantasm: "She gave it him, / and he hath giv'n it his whore." (IV.i.176-77) For Othello, the handkerchief has turned from the "token" of their love to a commodity which can be valued in money. Othello, here, fetishizes the object and tries to prevent it from becoming a commodity in order to protect their love from the rules of capitalist economy. Actually, the same position determines his first handkerchief-story:

She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it,
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed [...]. (III.iv.58-62; emphasis added)

Othello thus finally kills Desdemona and commits suicide because he, himself, has fallen victim to colonial mimicry. In his final speech he recognizes that he has been oscillating between Same and Other, the Venetian and the "turban'd Turk":

I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealious, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand
(Like the base [Indian]) threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him - thus. (V.ii.340-356)

Othello's suicide can be discussed against the background of the rites of the cannibalistic society Michel de Montaigne describes in his essay "Of Cannibals". He constructs the 'natural' New World society in its contrast to 'civilized' European society: "The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them."55. Male courage in a cannibalistic society, their desire to be eaten by their enemies rather than to submit to them, has its female counterpart in the woman's fidelity in a polygamous marriage. According to Certeau, "[t]hese two scandalous elements of supposedly barbarian society in fact constitute an economy of speech, in which the body is the price."56 This is also Othello's aim; he tries to transcend his deceptive corporality and produce 'immortal' and true language.

Yet, it is Desdemona's acceptance of her murder which can be interpreted as constituting this economy of speech. In response to Emilia's pragmatic version of faithfulness she swears, "Beshrew me, if I would do such a wrong / For the whole world." (IV.iii.78-79) Her death is both the price and proof of her faithfulness. To Othello, the 'mimic man', however, this form of speaking himself as "I" is denied. "Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate" - he can only be spoken by others, but the following sentences reveal the impossibility of even that task. What Othello proposes as his true "I", his life story, is, again, a conglomeration of stories taken from the colonial archive, which re-inscribe him in just that tradition. His "of one ... of one ... of one" points to the fact that he is the source and the object of an endless textual production. At the same time, it reveals the interchangeability of "the Moor", "the base Indian", "the Arab", "the turban'd Turk", and the "circumcised dog". So instead of killing the bodily Other and constructing himself as the Same, Othello, in his death, multiplies into all the diverse Others of early modern Christian society. Desdemona's corpse stabilizes the relationship between language and the world; it finally produces truthful language which was subverted by colonial mimicry. Her death, then, is an example of the instrumentalization of the feminine corpse for European representation as Elisabeth Bronfen describes it: "To represent over her dead body signals that the represented feminine body also stands in for concepts other than death, femininity and body - most notably the masculine artist and the community of the survivors."57 Over Othello's dead body, however, this stabilization of individual and collective identity cannot be realized. In contrast, instead of producing 'presence', it perpetuates the "metonymies of presence"58, which are the effect of colonial mimicry. Lodovico's final speech can thus be read as a reference to Iago's discursive production of "monsters". "This is thy work. The object poisons sight, / Let it be hid." (V.ii.364-365) Othello, in deed, is a play about bringing a "monstrous birth to the world's light" (I.iii.404). Othello's corpse, which is the final inscription of the colonial discourse on the body of the Other, cannot be employed for the symbolic order but, on the contrary, discloses its inherent paradoxes. It is a 'discursive monster', produced by the ambivalence of colonial mimicry, an 'object that poisons sight'.

Bibliography

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Footnotes

1 Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (London 1596, repr. Amsterdam/New York 1968. The English Experience No. 3), 7.

2 Mary Fuller characterizes Raleigh's voyage as a "search for the referent, a place to which can be attached the proper names Manoa and El Dorado." (Mary C. Fuller, "Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana", in: Representations 33 (1991), 51.)

3 Louis A. Montrose, "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery", in: Representations 33 (1991), 11.

4 Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", in: The Location of Culture (London/New York 1994), 86.

5 Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London 1588, repr. Amsterdam/New York 1971. The English Experience No. 349), E4r.

6 Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets", in: Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford 1988), 30.

7 Hariot, A Briefe and True Report, E4r-E4v.

8 Cf. Stephen Orgel, "Shakespeare and the Cannibals", in: Marjorie Garber (ed.), Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (Baltimore/London 1987), 41; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean (London/New York 1986), ch. 1: "Columbus and the Cannibals", pp. 13-43; and chapter 2 of my Wilde Frauen - Fremde Welten: Kolonisierungsgeschichten aus Amerika (forthcoming, Reinbek 1997).

9 William Bradshaw, A Direction for the Weaker Sort of Christians, Shewing in What Manner they Ought to Fit Themselves to the Worthy Receiving of the Sacrament (London 1609, 4th ed. 1615), p. 28, quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, "Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England", in: Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge 1996), 339.

10 William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, II", in: Res 13 (1987), 41.

11 Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, II", 40.

12 Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1704, repr. London 1967), 154; quoted in: Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, II", 39.

13 Greenblatt, "Remnants of the Sacred", 342, 340.

14 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London 1970), 33.

15 Elsewhere I have demonstrated that the early modern subject is conceptualized as male, whereas the world as object is feminized and, furthermore, woman metonymically represents the object world. Cf. chapter 1 of my Wilde Frauen, fremde Welten.

16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley etc. 1984), 138-39.

17 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 138.

18 Francis Fletcher, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake... (London 1628, repr.. Amsterdam/New York 1969. The English Experience No. 103), 72.

19 Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century", in: Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York/London 1990), 16-39.

20 Richard Eden, The First Three English Books on America (London 1511-1555), ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham 1885, repr. New York 1971), 106.

21 Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 89.

22 Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 89-90.

23 Cf. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, "Introduction", in: Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London/New York 1994), 2.

24 Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea", in: Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novack (eds.), The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (London 1972), 17.

25 Cf. G.K. Hunter, "Othello and Colour Prejudice", in: Kenneth Muir (ed.), Interpretations of Shakespeare (Oxford 1986), 180-207.

26 White, "The Forms of Wildness", 15.

27 Sander Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History. Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Age of AIDS (New York etc. 1989), 29.

28 Anthony Gerard Barthelmy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge/London 1987), 11.

29 Ben Jonson, "The Queenes Masques. The First, of Blacknesse", in: Ben Jonson, 11 vols., eds. C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford 1925-1952), vol. 7 (Oxford 1941, repr. 1952), 177.

30 Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 86.

31 Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 86.

32 Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 91.

33 All quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston etc. 1974).

34 William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I", in: Res 9 (1985), 12.

35 Cf. Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I", 6; "The Problem of the Fetish, II", 31-36.

36 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago/London 1980), 9.

37 Cf. Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia 1964).

38 Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester etc. 1989), 48.

39 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 245.

40 Karen Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiop White': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello"; in: Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (eds.), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York/London 1987), 150.

41 Cf. Hal Foster, "The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life", in: Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds.), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca/London 1993), 259.

42 Cf. Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret", in: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London etc. 1976), 163-177.

43 Cf. Margaret Ferguson, "Feathers and Flies: Aphra Behn and the Seventeenth-century Trade in Exotica", in: Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 235-259.

44 Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiop White'", 151-152.

45 The examples are well known; they range from S.T. Coleridge's assertion that Shakespeare did not mean Othello to be a "veritable Negro" to M.R. Ridley's emphasis that at least some black men actually do look like human beings: "There are more races than one in Africa, and that a man is black in colour is no reason why he should, even to European eyes, look subhuman. One of the finest heads I have ever seen on any human being was that of a negro conductor on an American Pullman car." (M.R. Ridley, ed. Othello, Arden edition, London 1958, li.) A survey of Othello's critical history is given by Michael Neill in "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello", in: Shakespeare Quarterly 41:4 (1989), 383-412.

46 Jyotsna Singh, "Othello's Identity", in: Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London/New York 1994), 298-299. In contrast to Singh's essay, to which my paper is greatly indebted, I try to discuss Othello in its broader historical context and analyse the specifically early modern processes of colonial discourse and colonial mimicry.

47 Cf. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 90.

48 Verena Stolcke, "Invaded Women: Gender, Race and Class in the Formation of Colonial Society", in Hendricks and Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race,' and Writing, 277.

49 "The play is structured around a cultural aporia, miscegenation." (Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiop White'", 145)

50 Cf. Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed", in: Margaret Ferguson (ed.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago 1986), 126-127.

51 Peter Stallybrass, "Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage", in: Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 290.

52 Lynda E. Boose, "'The Getting of a Lawful Race': Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman", in: Hendricks and Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period, 41.

53 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass./London 1990), 41.

54 Cf. Neill, "Unproper Beds", 406.

55 Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Caniballes", in: Essays, trans. John Florio (1603), 3 vols. (London/New York 1910, repr. 1946), vol. 1, 220.

56 Michel de Certeau, "Montaigne's 'Of Cannibals': The Savage I", in: Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester 1986), 75.

57 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester 1992), xi.

58 Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man", 90.