Post-Colonial Shakespeares (New Accents)

321 Pages·1998·6.96 MB·English

by  Ania Loomba

NEW ACCENTS
General editor: TERENCE HAWKES
Post-Colonial Shakespeares
This collection of new essays explores the multiple possibilities for the
study of Shakespeare in an emerging post-colonial period. PostColonial
Shakespeares examines the extent to which our assumption about such
key terms as ‘colonization’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’ derive from early
modern English culture. It also looks at how such terms are themselves
affected by what were established subsequently as ‘colonial’ forms of
knowledge.
The volume features original work by some of the leading critics within
the field of Shakespearean studies. It is the most authoritative collection
on this topic to date and represents an exciting step forward for post-
colonial studies.
Ania Loomba is the author of Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989) and
Colonialism/Post-Colonialism (1998). She is Associate Professor of English at
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Martin Orkin is the author of Shakespeare Against Apartheid (1987) and
Drama and the South African State (1991). He is currently Associate
Professor in the Departments of English and Theatre at the University of
Haifa, Israel.
NEW ACCENTS
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
IN THE SAME SERIES
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures Bell
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
Translation Studies Susan Basssnett
Critical Practice Catherine Belsey
Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett
Dialogue and Difference: English for the nineties ed. Peter Brooker and Peter Humm
Telling Stories: A theoretical analysis of narrative fiction Staeven Cohan and Linda
M.Shires
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam
Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley
Making a Difference: Feminist literary criticism ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn
Superstructuralism: The philosophy of structuralism and post-structuralism
Richard Harland
Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes
Subculture: The meaning of style Dick Hebdige
Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world Michael Holquist
The Politics of postmodernism Linda Hutcheon
Fantasy: The Literature of subversion Rosemary Jackson
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist literary theory Toril Moi
Deconstruction: Theory and practice Christopher Norris
Orality and Literacy Walter J.Ong
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Adult Comics: An introduction Roger Sabin
Criticism in Society Imre Salusinszky
Metafiction Patricia Waugh
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in practice Elizabeth Wright
Alternative Shakespeares ed. John Drakakis
Alternative Shakespeares Vol. 2 ed. Terence Hawkes
Studying British Cultures ed. Susan Bassnett
Post-Colonial
Shakespeares
Edited by
ANIA LOOMBA and MARTIN ORKIN
London and New York
First published 1998 recording, or in any information
by Routledge storage or retrieval system, without
11 New Fetter Lane, the permission in writing from the
London EC4P 4EE publishers.
This edition published in the Taylor & British Library Cataloguing in
Francis e-Library, 2004. Publication Data
Simultaneously published in A catalogue record for this book is available
the USA and Canada from the British Library
by Routledge
Library of Congress Cataloguing in
29 West 35th Street,
Publication Data
New York, NY 10001
A catalogue record for this book has been
© 1998 selection and editorial matter, Ania
requested
Loomba and Martin Orkin; individual
chapters, the contributors ISBN 0-203-42651-7 Master e-book ISBN
All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or ISBN 0-203-44247-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
other means, now known or hereafter ISBN 0-415-17386-8 (hbk)
invented, including photocopying and ISBN 0-415-17387-6 (pbk)
Contents

General editor’s preface vii
Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction: Shakespeare and the post-colonial question 1
Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin

Part 1

2 ‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting colonialism
in The Tempest 23
Jerry Brotton
3 ‘A most wily bird’: Leo Africanus, Othello and the
trafficking in difference 43
Jonathan Burton
4 ‘These bastard signs of fair’: Literary whiteness in
Shakespeare’s sonnets 64
Kim F.Hall
5 ‘’Tis not the fashion to confess’: ‘Shakespeare—Post-
coloniality—Johannesburg, 1996’ 84
Margo Hendricks
6 Nation and place in Shakespeare: The case of Jerusalem
as a national desire in early modern English drama 98
Avraham Oz
vi Contents
7 Bryn Glas 117
Terence Hawkes

Part 2

8 ‘Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows’:
Issues of race, hybridity and location in post-colonial
Shakespeares 143
Ania Loomba
9 Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the
centre 164
Michael Neill
10 Possessing the book and peopling the text 186
Martin Orkin
11 Shakespeare and Hanekom, King Lear and land:
A South African perspective 205
Nicholas Visser
12 From the colonial to the post-colonial: Shakespeare
and education in Africa 218
David Johnson
13 Shakespeare, psychoanalysis and the colonial
encounter: The case of Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet 235
Andreas Bertoldi
14 Shakespeare and theory 259
Jonathan Dollimore

References 277
Index 299
General editor’s preface
How can we recognize or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to
the task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for
and identify extensions and developments of what we already know. To
some degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable.
The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation around that
paradox, turning it, over the years, into the central concern of a
continuing project. We are obliged, of course, to be bold. Change is our
proclaimed business, innovation our announced quarry, the accents of
the future the language in which we deal. So we have sought, and still
seek, to confront and respond to those developments in literary studies
that seem crucial aspects of the tidal waves of transformation that
continue to sweep across our culture. Areas such as structuralism, post-
structuralism, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, subculture,
deconstruction, dialogism, post-modernism, and the new attention to the
nature and modes of language, politics and way of life that these bring,
have already been the primary concern of a large number of our
volumes. Their ‘nuts and bolts’ exposition of the issues at stake in new
ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them has proved an
effective stratagem against perplexity.
But the questions of what ‘texts’ are or may be has also become more
and more complex. It is not just the impact of electronic modes of
communication, such as computer networks and data banks, that has
forced us to revise our sense of the sort of material to which the process
viii General editor’s preface
called ‘reading’ may apply. Satellite television and supersonic travel have
eroded the traditional capacities of time and space to confirm prejudice,
reinforce ignorance, and conceal significant difference. Ways of life and
cultural practices of which we had barely heard can now be set
compellingly beside—can even confront—our own. The effect is to make
us ponder the culture we have inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first
time, as an intricate, continuing construction. And that means that we
can also begin to see, and to question, those arrangements of
foregrounding and backgrounding, of stressing and repressing, of
placing at the centre and of restricting to the periphery, that give our own
way of life its distinctive character.
Small wonder if, nowadays, we frequently find ourselves at the
boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable: peering
into an abyss out of which there begin to lurch awkwardly formed
monsters with unaccountable—yet unavoidable—demands on our
attention. These may involve unnerving styles of narrative, unsettling
notions of ‘history’, unphilosophical ideas about ‘philosophy’, even
unchildish views of ‘comics’, to say nothing of a host of barely
respectable activities for which we have no reassuring names.
In this situation, straightforward elucidation, careful unpicking,
informative bibliographies, can offer positive help, and each New Accents
volume will continue to include these. But if the project of closely
scrutinizing the new remains none the less a disconcernting one, there
are still overwhelming reasons for giving it all the consideration we can
muster. The unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our
thoughts.
TERENCE HAWKES
Contributors
Andreas Bertoldi, Research Student, Department of Comparative
Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Jerry Brotton, Research Fellow, School of English, University of
Leeds, UK
Jonathan Burton, Adjunct Lecturer in English, Baruch College of the
City University of New York
Jonathan Dollimore, Professor of English, Humanities Graduate
Research Centre, University of Sussex, UK
Kim F.Hall, Associate Professor of English, Georgetown University
Terence Hawkes, Professor of English, University of Wales, Cardiff
Margo Hendricks, Associate Professor of Literature, University of
California, Santa Cruz
David Johnson, Lecturer in English, University of Natal, Durban
Ania Loomba, Associate Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi
Michael Neill, Professor of English, University of Auckland, New
Zealand