Shakespeare in the Global South

Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation

Sandra Young

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350035751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Introducing the Global South

The transformations Shakespearean drama has undergone across an increasingly unequal world allow us to glimpse the rich potential for subversion and renewal within his work. In travelling across the globe, traditional Shakespeare has been dismantled and reimagined, and the result is illuminating for cultural studies. The many Shakespeares in play in the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic worlds call for a scholarly practice that is responsive to the surprising solidarities Shakespeare’s plays have evoked in nontraditional staging contexts. Scholars have celebrated Shakespeare’s availability as a resource for writers, activists and politicians during anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles, and contemporary theatre-makers have drawn on Shakespeare in a manner that complicates the dichotomies of earlier cultural histories that embed Shakespeare within a forbidding colonial canon.

Playwrights and theatre-makers, alert to what Françoise Lionnet calls ‘transcolonial solidarity’, have helped to reanimate Shakespeare’s work by evoking creative and political affinities across oceans of difference. However, the temptation to view this capacity for revision as affirming, above all, Shakespeare’s exceptionalism has the regrettable effect of obscuring the mutuality of creative innovations that work powerfully to renew Shakespeare and lend his work startling contemporaneity. As theatre-makers across the global South explore affinities between their worlds and Shakespeare’s, they allow us to imagine, in sympathy with Shakespeare, the possibility of a transformed critical landscape. It is this capacity for mutual affinity across vast differences in time and space that provides the impetus for this study.

This book seeks to shift the lines of enquiry into Shakespeare’s ongoing presence across the global South by engaging with the histories, scholarship and adaptations of Shakespeare from various locations within Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia and the Indian Ocean world, and from within the pockets of vulnerability and disempowerment or what one might call ‘southerliness’ in the North that result from diasporic mobilities. As this list makes evident, the political geographies that provide the critical framework for this inquiry resist categorization. Even so, the conviction underpinning this book is that the critical frame of the global South and the lateral view it extends across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds offer to Global Shakespeare a helpful framework within which to consider some of Shakespeare’s contemporary cultural and political resonances. In reflecting on the diverse incarnations of Shakespearean drama across the global South, I aim to test some of the vocabulary with which Shakespeare scholars have sought to engage a diverse and unequal world, in particular through the concepts of the creolization, indigenization, localization and Africanization of Shakespeare. These terms appear repeatedly in studies concerned to understand the impact of contemporary Shakespeare practice across the globe. They warrant critical reflection on account of the insights they offer into the complex cultural histories in which Shakespeare’s global presence is now imbricated, despite their evident limitations. Where specific histories have yielded particular stories of power, resistance and transformation, postcolonialism’s familiar dichotomies may prove limiting. This study focuses therefore on the connections and affinities between diverse contexts and histories, potentially shifting the orientation within which readers might interpret Shakespeare’s resonances across the globe.

This book also seeks to resist the predictable region-by-region framework familiar within the field of Global Shakespeare, in which individual studies focus on colourful local translocations of Shakespearean drama, all of which remain tangential to the larger critical preoccupations within Shakespeare studies more broadly. Academic studies of Global Shakespeare tend to focus on particular regions, following a logic that positions Shakespeare as the dominant figure in the creative partnership of, say, ‘Indian Shakespeare’ or ‘Shakespeare in Africa’. Shakespeare remains the dominant figure – the noun – and the region under focus is positioned as a colourful variant, qualifying the primary. By contrast, this book takes its lead from recent scholarship that recasts the global South as a source of innovative critical theory in its own right. Given the nature of my inquiry into the global South as a category of analysis for cultural studies and as a vantage point from which to engage critical theory as well as Shakespeare studies, I have allowed the inquiry to be shaped by some of the critical terms that populate Global Shakespeare studies rather than by geopolitical regions, in a commitment to sidestepping the regionalization of Global Shakespeare that has led to its ongoing marginalization.

In forging conversations across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, this book explores the critical frame provided by the idea of a global South in order to theorize cultural difference. It looks sideways across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to a variety of nontraditional centres of Shakespeare theatre-making to explore the solidarities and affinities not as evident within Stratford’s Shakespeare. It traces the innovative theatre practices in Mauritius, South Asia, Brazil, post-apartheid South Africa and the diasporic urban spaces of the global North, to assess the lessons for cultural theory that are to be found in the transformation Shakespeare has undergone across the world. I reflect on the theoretical vocabulary scholars have found productive in trying to fathom the impact of these transformations, through their use of terms such as ‘creolization’, ‘indigenization’, ‘Africanization’ and ‘localization’ of endlessly transforming iterations of Shakespeare’s work.

A brief history of the term ‘global South’

There is a case to be made for the global South as a category of analysis for Shakespeare studies, given its presence within cultural studies more broadly. I make claims about the value, for revisionist scholarship, of the view from the South, not only for those who live and work in the South or who assert an affiliation or a commitment to the politics of the South, but also for critical thought generally. The term ‘global South’ has developed theoretical purchase in recent years, but the cultural signification of what we might call ‘southerliness’ has a surprisingly clear foothold in early modernity too; early modern geographers wrote explicitly of the people of the ‘southern climes’ or ‘southern nations’, or sometimes simply the ‘south’, installing as they did so subtle forms of racialization and legitimizing colonial exploitation, as the following two examples attest. Sixteenth-century English compiler Richard Eden writes in a generalized fashion about ‘the south partes of the world’ when flaunting the extractable wealth and exoticism of regions of the world found ‘betwene the two Tropikes vnder ye Equinoctial or burning lyne’.¹ The seventeenth-century English cartographer Richard Blome sets up a distinction between the ‘Southern Nations’ of the world and the ‘Northern People’ in the epistle of his translation of Bernhardus Varenius’s Geographia in 1682. According to Blome, body and mind are shaped by climate, which explains the unquestionable superiority of the ‘Northern People’ of the globe who ‘have always been Victorious and predominant over the Meridional or Southern Nations’.² I have argued elsewhere that the distinction between ‘South’ and ‘North’ emerged during the early modern expansionist period as a key mechanism for establishing a racial hierarchy on a global scale.³ The ‘south partes’ were regions whose natural resources seemed to invite exploitation and whose seemingly primitive peoples warranted the influences of the North.

The term’s value for cultural studies today is related to this cultural geography and the oblique angle on colonial modernity it enables. The critical category of the global South challenges the normativity of the view from the North, bringing into focus an alternative set of interests and material conditions. Even so, there is a degree of ambivalence surrounding the term. This is partly as a result of its early iterations in United Nations ‘development’ discourse (specifically, a 2003 United Nations Programme, ‘Forging a Global South’), where it reads as paternalistic, if somewhat idealistic, in seeking to encourage ‘South–South’ connections and self-directed strategies for growth. As Arif Dirlik explains, the ‘global South has its roots in earlier third-world visions of liberation, and those visions still have an important role to play in restoring human ends to development’.⁴ Critics might argue that the term is misleading: the distinction it identifies between a putative ‘North’ and ‘South’ cannot in fact be mapped onto a fixed cartographic grid. But the crucial thing about the concept of the global South is that its usefulness lies in the cultural and economic alignments it signals, despite the incongruities that might exist within a single nation or region. Released from its literal hermeneutics, the term offers a way of interpreting manifestly distinct texts or performances together. It highlights cultural and political alignments without imposing homogeneity and ignoring the complexity of historical differences across an unequal world.

The conceptual frame provided by the idea of a ‘global South’ is therefore flawed but potentially useful for cultural studies as it seeks to make critical interventions without reinforcing familiar binaries. Dirlik has outlined the ‘chaotic’ and surprising alignments that frustrate any attempt to map a geographical grid onto the economies of the world.⁵ Even so, he finds in the notion of a global South an effective rubric with which to identify the struggles and ‘affinities’ that have the capacity to challenge the hegemony of a modernity rooted in coloniality: ‘There are certain affinities between these societies in terms of mutual recognition of historical experiences with colonialism and neocolonialism’.⁶ Most important, perhaps, the global South may allow for the inclusion, as Dirlik puts it, of ‘the voices of the formerly colonized and marginalized in a world that already has been shaped by a colonial modernity to which there is no alternative in sight’.⁷ It is this privileging of previously hidden stories and the space it creates for critical perspectives on race and power that make the idea of a global South compelling. I explore the ways in which the framework of the global South enables a perspective on relations of domination and freedom across a complex world that differs from the signal points generated by postcolonialism. Instead of treating colonialism’s abuses and postcolonialism’s resistances as the defining moments for all contexts of historical domination across an uneven world, the term draws attention to connections and affinities between diverse contexts across the South. It also opens up space for greater nuance as we seek to understand Shakespeare’s resonances today.

The term ‘global South’ has gained particular visibility in cultural studies and the social sciences over the last decade, although it was in circulation for some time before then. Since 2007, Indiana University Press has published a journal titled The Global South; a special issue in 2011 explored the ‘The Global South and World Dis/Order’, devoted to exploring ‘the institutional, disciplinary, and geopolitical possibilities of the “global south” as an emergent conceptual apparatus’.⁸ This formulation (‘World Dis/Order’) echoes an earlier special issue of another journal: Third World Quarterly titled their first issue in 1994 ‘The South in the New World (Dis)Order’. In this title, too, the editors signal that the term does more than designate a geographical region; it also registers the possibility of disruption and transformation. Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo, editors of the 2011 special issue, make this explicit by stating that ‘tensions between ordering and disordering [are] implicit in the “global south”’ conceptually.⁹

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s recent monograph on the topic invites us to think about what it might mean to theorize from the South.¹⁰ Theory from the South seeks to scramble the dichotomies that render intellectual history and modernity the preserve of the northern parts of the world, resulting from their global dominance after centuries of economic clout. The Comaroffs’ project forms a radical challenge to assumptions about the ascendancy of northern modes of economic and social organization, as they indicate in their provocative subtitle, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. For the Comaroffs, ‘the qualifications and question marks brought by non-Western experience to mainstream discourses about the nature of modernity itself’ hold greater promise for a world at risk than the North’s conservative legacy.¹¹ The example of cultural anthropophagy, based on Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibalist Manifesto, as I argue in a brief discussion in the final chapter of this book, offers a compelling example of the fundamentally transformative possibilities of cultural theory from the global South, as well as its important resonances for Shakespeare studies.

As a term, the ‘global South’ may seem too vague – and inaccurate – to be of much use for an incisive practice of cultural analysis which is attuned to the specificities of cultural histories. That would certainly seem to be the case if it is treated literally, as a category of analysis based on cartography and the physical world it seeks to map. However, its usefulness lies in the oblique angle it affords, or as the Comaroffs put it, the ‘ex-centric as an angle of vision’ it enables.¹² The global South draws attention to what is barely visible within colonial modernity. By identifying the existence of an alternative set of interests and material conditions, the global South challenges the normativity of the view from the North. ‘To the degree that the making of modernity has been a world-historical process, it can as well be narrated from its undersides as it can from its self-proclaimed centers’.¹³

The term brings with it a set of preoccupations and a history that render it ambivalent, at risk of being marshalled in service of an appropriative globalization. Dirlik traces the emergence of the term in development studies rhetoric and its relationship to its now-tarnished predecessor, the ‘Third World’, in an editorial introducing the first issue of the new journal The Global South in 2007. His subtitle alerts us to the term’s ‘promise’ for a transformative politics, as well as its ‘predicament’: the term has been brought to prominence in part through the ideologies of global development and their manifestations in global policy programmes.¹⁴

As its provenance suggests, the term’s lexical weight does not derive from geography primarily but from the discourses of development and globalization, and the flows of capital they seek to identify. The geographical vocabulary is thus merely emblematic and not as precise as the cartographical grid would seem to suggest. Dirlik reminds us that the alignments of ‘North’ and ‘South’ are much more ‘chaotic’ than the terms themselves would seem to indicate.¹⁵ This is not only because the southern hemisphere is home to countries such as Australia and New Zealand, whose gross domestic products put them on an economic par with the world’s strongest economies, while some historically disempowered communities, like the Inuit people, inhabit a region that is further north than almost any other. It is also because of the success of globalization and the uneven, uncontained spread of global capital: within any given national economy ‘there are groups and classes in most societies of the South who are already part of the transnational economy’, and nodes of poverty and alienation within the wealthiest of northerly contexts.¹⁶ The terminology cannot be adopted wholescale to describe a consistent pattern of economic relations across the globe.

The particular value of the global South for cultural studies inheres in the perspective on power and privilege that it enables and the promise of ‘the distinctive forms of knowledge yielded...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing the Global South
• 2. Creolization
• 3. Indigenization
• 4. Africanization
• 5. Diasporic disruptions
• 6. Afterword: Insurgent Cosmopolitanism in the South
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint