Isolated Spaces, Fragmented Places: Caryl Phillips’ Ghettos in The Nature of Blood and The European Tribe

Abstract

This study focuses on Caryl Phillips's deviant Othello character in The Nature of Blood and his transformation and perception of and in the ghettoized space of Venice in a geocritical scope. Geocriticism provides us with genuinely unique approaches to explore real-and-fictional space of Venice in The Nature of Blood (a fictional work) and The European Tribe (a non-fictional work), and other literary and non-literary materials. Interdisciplinary methods of geocriticism also help us analyze the cartographies and continuously changing spatial relations and discover unseen power correlations by using various cultural discourses such as architecture, philosophy, sociology, and geography. By applying geocritical methods of 'multifocalization,' 'polysensoriality,' and 'stratigraphic vision' into the text in the lights of the geocritical concepts of 'spatiotemporality,' 'transgressivity,' and 'referentiality,' we delve deep into analyses of explicit and implicit references, allusions, and connotations attached to the ghettoized space of Venice in The Nature of Blood and The European Tribe.