Shifting Identities

The exchanges between countries and cultures have been witnessing anunprecedented boom ever since WWII. People are more concerned about theproblems left by colonialism. From the perspective of postcolonialism andintercultural communication, this paper takes the master British dramatist WilliamShakespeare’s masterpiece Othello and Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season ofMigration to the North as target texts, analyzing the identity construction of the twoBlack protagonists, Othello and Mustafa, aiming to reveal the identity crisis caused bythe complicated racial and power relationships with Edward Said’s Orientalism and J.Berry’s acculturation orientations.Othello longs for a white identity and tries various approaches to be assimilatedinto the white culture, but ends up with murdering his wife Desdemona under Iago’sincitement, giving up all his previous efforts. Mustafa wants to take revenge on theEuropean colonist power through conquering white women of different social classes;after realizing that he is “a lie” and returning to Sudan, Mustafa cannot get rid of thestruggles between two cultures and finally disappears in the flood of the Nile, therepresentative of the African culture.The two protagonists are both Black men living in the white culture. Confrontingthe wishful imagination and malicious presumptions of the white, as well as theinevitable pains of being Black “bleached” with white color, they could not obtain theappropriate place to settle their bodies and souls but have to walk into tragic ends.There exists strong intertextuality between Othello which came into being at theend of16thcentury and the beginning of17^th century, and Season of Migration to theNorth that was published in20^th century. Through the comparative reading, theimportance of identity construction issue under racial and colonial context is found tobelong to many times in human history instead of being a one-time problem.