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Rewriting the Story of the Moor: Transcultural Adaptation from Shakespeare’s Othello to Akhtar’s Disgraced

The public attention to and literature criticism of Othello and Disgrace, which share the narrative of the fall of the moor who was married to a white woman, shed light on the tragic moor. The two moors, Othello and Amir, represent otherness and the politics of difference which symbolize uncodified and uncodifiable diversity. Cinthio’s ‘Disdemona and the Moor’ is dramatized by Shakespeare, whose story of the moor is adapted in Disgraced . Appropriating ‘the desperate struggle of the white society to disgrace Othello the moor’ and ‘vehemence in the pre-text such as wife killing’, Akhtar creates an Islamic narrative which is hidden and/or forbidden in Othello. Crosscurrents of the social imaginary between the 16 th century Renaissance European society and the 21 st century multicultural American society reflect changes in the rhetoric and the cognitive machinism for race and ethnicity. Akhtar’ adaptation is a textual poaching, but his adapted work is a creative art. Furthermore, the adapted work completes and supplements the original, and gives canonicity to Othello . Rewriting the story of the moor is a form of communication between the two plays as well as the two different societies, which arguably represents the core value of transcultural adaptation.