Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation

Description

Contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have brought into sharp focus the legacies of slavery, racism and colonial dispossession that still haunt the global South. Looking sideways across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to nontraditional centres of Shakespeare practice, Shakespeare in the Global South explores the solidarities generated by contemporary adaptations and their stories of displacement and survival. The book takes its lead from innovative theatre practice in Mauritius, North India, Brazil, post-apartheid South Africa and the diasporic urban spaces of the global North, to assess the lessons for cultural theory emerging from the new works. Using the 'global South' as a critical frame, Sandra Young reflects on the vocabulary scholars have found productive in grappling with the impact of the new iterations of Shakespeare's work, through terms such as 'creolization', 'indigenization', 'localization', 'Africanization' and 'diaspora'. Shakespeare's presence in the global South invites us to go beyond familiar orthodoxies and to recognize the surprising affinities felt across oceans of difference in time and space that allow Shakespeare's inventiveness to be a part of the enchanting subversions at play in contemporary theatre's global currents.

Sandra Young is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.She is the author of The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge. Her research interests include Early modern literature and thought and Shakespeare in the Global South.

Shakespeare in the Global South is a critical triumph! Young brilliantly challenges Shakespeare studies and contemporary cultural studies through her insightful readings. She crafts a careful, beautiful, and ultimately optimistic book. -- Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University, USA