This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the use of intercultural allusion in narratives of transcultural identity. Identity is taken to be narrative in performance, one element of which, intercultural allusion, serves pragmatically to broker the transcultured subject's insertion into the host culture. The paper then shows how Othello's narratives of identity in Shakespeare's tragedy are mimetic of both identity as performance and of the strategic deployment of intercultural allusion. The article concludes with a consideration of Caryl Phillips's reaction to the Othello icon of exotic ethnicity in his meditative novel "The Nature of Blood". This reaction forms part of Phillips's own identity narrative and is illustrative of how a real person's identity is also reliant upon allusion--often in spite of itself. (Contains 7 notes.)