Intertextual Reimagining of Desdemona: Feminist Revision, Postcolonial Memory, and Shakespearean Adaptation

In an age increasingly concerned with gender justice, racial memory, and the decolonization of literary canons, Shakespeare's Desdemona remains a critical site for rethinking how women's voices are silenced, revised, and restored across cultures and historical moments. This study examines the intertextual reimagining of Desdemona in William Shakespeare's Othello, Toni Morrison's Desdemona, and Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, arguing that these works should not be read as isolated dramatic texts but as a tri-textual field of feminist revision and postcolonial critique. Addressing a gap in previous scholarship, which has largely treated Morrison's and Vogel's adaptations separately, the article offers a theoretically grounded comparative reading that brings the three plays into dialogue.

Methodologically, the study employs qualitative intertextual analysis and close reading, drawing on Julia Kristeva's intertextuality, Gérard Genette's hypotext/hypertext model, Adrienne Rich's feminist re-vision, Linda Hutcheon's theory of adaptation, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's postcolonial feminism. It shows how Morrison and Vogel transform Desdemona from a passive, silenced figure within Shakespearean tragedy into a complex site of agency, resistance, memory, and feminist critique.

The findings reveal that Morrison restores Desdemona's voice through purgatorial self-knowledge, Barbary's recovered Black female memory, and cross-racial solidarity, whereas Vogel uses parody, class consciousness, sexual agency, and chamber-space disruption to dismantle patriarchy.

This study has re-framed the problem of Desdemona's representation not as a question of character revision alone, but as a broader inquiry into how canonical drama can be reread, contested, and politically reactivated through feminist and postcolonial intertextuality.