Abstract
In 2017, India and Pakistan mark 70 years since Independence and Canada 150 since Confederation. Decolonisation was accompanied by exclusions from national imaginings, rooted in the economic, cultural and political imperatives of British colonialism, including its territorial claims, cartographic revisions, power hierarchies and divide-and-rule policies. These exclusions were evinced in the bloodshed of Partition’s communal rioting, with its now iconic images of refugees fleeing across the newly created Indo-Pakistani border, and the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples by European “settler” societies such as those of Canada. In his Introduction in this issue, Joel Deshaye comments on Canada’s residential school system’s assimilative practices towards Indigenous children in the nineteenth century as reflected in 2016 poetry and criticism, engaging, in part directly, with the findings of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (2015) and the traumas resulting from such “immersive forms of colonial pedagogy” (Hutchings, 2016: 301).
While we look forward to literary and critical assessments of the contemporary significance of these anniversaries in next year’s bibliographic listings, another anniversary historically intertwined with the globalising project of colonialism should be noted as reflected in the current issue. 2016 marked 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, occasioning initiatives by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, BBC World Service, the British Council and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, among others, to celebrate his legacy. It came as the latest in a trio of Shakespeare-related anniversaries: 2014 celebrated the playwright’s 450th birthday, inspiring the Hogarth Shakespeare Project (launched in 2015) of contemporary retellings of his work, and 2012 saw the World Shakespeare Festival, a prominent part of the Cultural Olympiad accompanying the 2012 London Olympics, proclaiming Shakespeare “Britain’s greatest cultural contribution to the world” in its centrepiece British Museum–British Petroleum “Shakespeare Staging the World” exhibition (Bennett and Carson, 2013: 1). The Festival was documented in Shakespeare beyond English: A Global Experiment (2013), a collection exploring the 37 productions of Shakespeare plays staged in 37 languages. The inexhaustible marketability of Shakespeare as a global product is also evinced in the growth of the field of Global Shakespeare Studies and projects such as the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (https://www.worldshakesbib.org), an international electronic database of scholarship and theatrical productions from 1960 to the present, hosted by Texas A&M University’s Department of English (see Estill, 2014).
Shakespeare’s numerous afterlives have often been both mutually contradictory and mutually regenerative, from their contemporary role in the ritualised, Janus-faced performance of Englishness/Britishness in the recent recurrence of Shakespeare tributes, masking in their “enthusiastic and celebratory mode”, as the editors of Shakespeare beyond English note, the “continuing inequities both locally and abroad” (Bennett and Carson, 2013: 4) and the more worrying, nostalgic media evocations, amidst the 2016 Brexit campaign, of national sovereignty via John of Gaunt’s phrase, “this scepter’d isle”, in Richard II, to the multiplicity of radical political revisionings of plays such as The Tempest and Othello in acts of “writing back”, to a non-vindictive “remembering”, hybridising Shakespeare with local traditions of performance, iconography and mythology, to ludic irreverence, often “untroubled by the historical and institutional contexts of the plays – or the play itself” – but serving, instead locally-relevant political critique (Mukherjee, 2013: 184-5). Claire Chambers offers readings of a range of dramatic, filmic and fictional postcolonial re-creations of Shakespeare’s Othello that “have moved beyond ‘writing back’ to more creative and confident conversations across spaces and tenses” (2016: 8).
The present issue includes a range of responses to Shakespeare’s work and to its multi-faceted histories of appropriation. Safiya Sinclair’s multiple-award winning debut poetry collection Cannibal contributes to the long history of Caribbean postcolonial revisions of The Tempest and, more specifically, of its “salvage and deformed slave”, Caliban, whose name is a link in the chain of corruptions/speculative etymologies used to identify the Caribbean with cannibalism in the European imagination during the early stages of exploration and colonialism. Here, a complex female Caliban figure negotiates her place within Jamaica’s post/colonial histories, race and racism in contemporary America and states of exile from and within the English language.
Two more poetic responses to Shakespeare appear in this year’s listings from, respectively, South Africa and Zimbabwe: Collen Nxumalo’s Ghetto Shakespeare and Philani A. Nyoni’s Mars His Sword. Self-published, Nxumalo’s collection of poetry is a grass-roots claim to Shakespeare the Bard rather than a conscious re-contextualisation of The Merchant of Venice’s Venetian ghetto in the South African township. Yet, the title carries the charged histories of the term ghetto. Bryan Cheyette charts its trajectories from its origin in medieval and early modern Europe, through its nineteenth-century attribution to European and North American sites of Jewish segregation in urban conurbations, to the 1940s’ turn in the term’s usage “from the Nazi ghettos in modern Europe to the mainly but not exclusively African American ghettos in many of America’s large northern cities” and its subsequent reclamation through popular culture by the black urban poor (2017: 438). It is this latter politicisation of the term that Nxumalo taps into as a “source of self-identification and resistance” while also contributing to the cultural exchange it has enabled. A “traveling concept par excellence”, the ghetto contradicts the “spatial fixity” it has been used to denote (ibid.). Nxumalo’s Ghetto Shakespeare posits itself as the honorific title of its author but also revisits in this way the historical “portable”, “pocket” or “essential” forms and formats of Shakespeare’s dissemination, in tandem with the Bible, as tools of colonial education.
The title of Nyoni’s Mars His Sword is intriguing in its linguistic ingenuity. It borrows a phrase from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55: “When wasteful war shall statues overturn, / And broils root out the work of masonry, / Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn / The living record of your memory”(55.5-8). Whereas in Shakespeare, even Mars’ sword of war is an ineffective weapon against the written legacy of poetry (“this powerful rhyme”), Nyoni identifies his poetry precisely with the power of the warrior god against the “original”, without changing its word order, in a cut-and-paste pastiche. The ambiguity of this phrase as a “loan” is inherent in the syntax of the Elizabethan text, with its list of negative alternatives drawing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Is “Mars his sword” the sword of Mars or is “his sword” that of the poet, a grammatical object to the actions of Mars which are postponed to the end of the line in the verb “burn” (in the manner of the earlier “overturn” which follows its object “statues”)? Mars His Sword performs a degree of parody in its unceremonious reduction of Sonnet 55’s complexity of grammar and formality of register, claiming Mars’/Shakespeare’s sword. Nyoni’s poetry sets out, like many other postcolonial appropriations, to simultaneously beat Shakespeare at his own game in a playful duel (the volume contains 308 sonnets, double those authored by Shakespeare) and adopt him as a political ally by mimicking his “accent” (Loomba and Orkin, 1998: 7).
Apart from these two masculine (mis-)identifications with Shakespeare stands Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest in her novel, Hag-Seed, part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, mentioned earlier. Set in Canada, it focuses on the politics, hierarchies and intrigues of its theatre world, where machinations against Artistic Director Felix Phillips force him into a job with the Literacy through Literature Program at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute. There, he directs performances of Shakespeare’s plays, with the inmates as actors, and plots revenge, which is to be carried out through his production of The Tempest. Phillips’ actors are thus literally and symbolically imprisoned within Shakespeare as an edifying project, the personal agenda informing the directorial/pedagogical approach of the novel’s Prospero and the overarching networks of the global Shakespeare artistic industry and of the discipline of English Studies, within which Shakespeare as a culture text is also caught, sentenced to endlessly re-create his work. Yet, Atwood ironically has Phillips cast/incarcerate himself in the role of Prospero within his penal-colony replica and his inmates all desire to be Caliban, the eponymous Hag-Seed, in their character afterlife sketches.
2016’s listings offer two more engagements with the trajectories of Shakespeare as a project of colonial education as well as its rhizomatic offshoots: Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet – combining travelogue, memoir, history and anecdote – by Edward Wilson-Lee, a Shakespeare scholar at Cambridge, raised in Kenya, where his parents met as wildlife conservationists, and the PMLA piece, part of the Journal’s forum on Literature in the World, “Personal Reflections on Teaching Literature” by Susan Nalugwa Kiguli, senior lecturer at Makerere University, Uganda, a “pioneering and important center for the study of literature in East Africa” (Gikandi, 2016: 1195). In her Introduction to the East and Central Africa bibliography, Grace Musila offers a nuanced overview of these two works, from the extraordinary range of Shakespearean mobilizations in the service of various political causes and agents in East Africa, as traced in Wilson-Lee’s study, to the inevitable centrality of Shakespeare on the 1980s syllabus of Makerere University, where his hallowed status afforded one the “right to the knowledge of letters” (1531). Wilson-Lee’s and Kiguli’s works are both listed as “General Studies”, under the “Regional” and “Uganda” subheadings, respectively. I have brought them together, moving Shakespeare in Swahililand from “Studies on Individual Writers”, so as to acknowledge that, as Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin remind us, “there is no single ‘Shakespeare’ that is simply reproduced globally” (1998: 7) and that the history of Shakespeare appropriations should be seen as “demystifying” concepts such as “authorship” or “bardolatry” (Desmet and Sawyer, 2013: 5).
2016 also marked the “anniversary” of the Dramatic Performances Act, implemented in India in 1876, through which the colonial government gave itself the power to ban plays as “seditious”, imprison theatre personalities and generally control forms of cultural expression (Kundu, 2013). That a section of India’s intellectual elite supported the Act of 1876 at the time, not only in an attempt to avoid antagonising the colonial government, but also to assist in eradicating “what, in their view, were expressions of obscenity and immorality” and to protect their profit and status (ibid. 79-80), points to some of the ways in which the colonial regime co-opted local “actors” into its own performance. In the process, it also displaced indigenous performance forms (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1996: 7-8). Yet, the threatening, agitative potential of theatre to which the 1876 Act responded, rooted in performance as a perlocutionary act, has continuously been employed in anti-colonial resistance, especially in cultures of rich and long-standing oral, pictorial and plastic traditions where popular theatre forms could reach illiterate audiences and contest the imposed primacy of printed literature. Since independence, theatre activism has also served interrogations of policies and practices of the postcolonial state.
The current issue includes an extraordinarily broad range of works of or about drama, theatre and performance exploring forms and issues such as the possibilities of political activism through protest theatre; identity and community theatre; indigeneity, gender, linguistic codes and proxemics in performance; syncretism and interweaving as paradigms in theatre practice; national histories, anxieties and pre-occupations as reflected in dramatic productions and receptions of specific plays and the oeuvres and careers of playwrights and directors. Muneeza Shamsie notes a prominent dramatic concern with global politics, radicalization and lawlessness in Pakistan, including Usman Ali’s The Odyssey which re-imagines Homer’s epic hero as a senior Pakistani army officer returning to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after two years of fighting militants. Kelvin Chikonzo’s article, “From Panic to Reconciliation: Protest Theatre and the State in Zimbabwe, 1999-2012”, examines how theatre makers contested government monopoly over articulations of possibilities for national healing and reconciliation after the country’s political and economic crisis of 1999-2008. Yvette Nolan and Ric Knowles’ edited collection Performing Indigeneity explores identity, theatre history and claiming space through indigenous performance. Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space, edited by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger, charts out the three-decade history of Cape Town’s influential theatre company, Magnet Theatre, alongside that of South Africa, its objective to create a repertoire of original African productions, its “embodied practice” intended to trouble fixed narratives of identity, history and memory, and its performance aesthetic of “thick description” to read cultural events, encouraging spectators to get close to a sense of “being there”, relevant in particular to its engagement with forms of national remembering and “sites of memory” in and around Cape Town such as Robben Island (a place of banishment and incarceration) or District Six (an evacuated apartheid-era working class district) (2016: 3-7). Paul Maunder’s essay “A Democratic Mode of Production” reflects on his experience of devising and scripting group and community theatre in New Zealand and on the evolution of his understanding of theatre as a democratic partnership between theatre workers and the host community, inclusive of various ethnic communities, sex workers and the mentally ill, as well as drawing on indigenous rituals of entering and leaving another’s space. “Young, Gifted and Brown: The Liberation of Oceanic Youth in The Beautiful Ones” by Nicola Hyland analyses how the multi-media production of Hone Kouka’s play challenges the “enduring moralistic lore about the ways ‘young, brown folk’ should be represented in theatre” (2016: 333), drawing on concepts from Maori cosmology. Christoph Schubert’s “Im/Politeness in Postcolonial Plays: Investigating Speech Acts, Code-Switching and Appropriateness” contributes to the relatively recent discipline of postcolonial pragmatics, investigating postcolonial Englishes, through an analysis of code-switching between languages as a way of negotiating solidarity or distance in dramatic texts by indigenous playwrights from Nigeria, Jamaica and New Zealand. Durgesh Ravande’s Indian English Drama: A Gynocritical Perspective sets out to lend more visibility to work by India’s female dramatists Bharati Sarabhai, Mahasweta Devi and Manjuba Padmanabhan in the context of an otherwise male-dominated tradition. The Sri Lanka and Malaysia and Singapore bibliographies testify to vibrant theatre scenes, with a great number of dramatic productions staged and reviewed, providing a platform for work by both emerging and prominent playwrights (with Singaporean Haresh Sharma, an example of the latter), and with the continuous popularity and incredible reach of theatre in Sri Lanka, seen in the annual theatre competitions amongst the University of Peradeniya’s academic departments, including those of Dentistry and Management and Engineering. In his Introduction, S.W. Perera also comments on interesting cross-cultural theatrical collaborations between Sri Lanka’s Mind Adventures Theatre and Northern Irish theatre artist Alice Malseed in staging Better than Ever Before, a play that examines the realities of contemporary Colombo and Belfast, and between Sri Lanka’s Stages Theatre Group and the Rwandan theatre group Mashirika in producing Dear Children, Sincerely, which dramatises intergenerational dialogue.
Another theme in this issue, that of Jewishness, also acquires interesting configurations across entries in the bibliographic listings of, respectively, The Caribbean, Australia, Canada and India. Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination by Sarah Phillips Casteel is the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean writing – fiction, memoir and poetry – including work by well-known authors from the English-, French-, Spanish- and Dutch-speaking Caribbeans: Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others. She finds that Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal, following the Christian re-conquest of Granada, and the Holocaust as part of their literary historiographies of slavery and its legacies. This trajectory of the Jewish diaspora, from fifteenth-century Spain to the Caribbean, is traced in Gary Barwin’s first novel for adults, Yiddish for Pirates. It tells the story of a young, Jewish seafaring adventurer, Moishe, who encounters Christopher Columbus on fleeing Spain, and becomes a pirate in search of the Fountain of Youth. The story is told by Moishe’s 500-year-old polyglot parrot, Aaron, “fluent in both remembering and forgetting” (2). The Collected Stories of Pinchas Goldhar offers, in translation, the stories of this Polish Jew who moved to Melbourne in 1928 and wrote in Yiddish, edited a Yiddish paper and himself translated Australian writing into Yiddish. The Polish-Jewish protagonists of his stories wrestle with estrangement, loneliness and prejudice in both Poland and Australia and offer an interesting, interstitial perspective on Australian society in the first half of the twentieth century. A similar, minority perspective informs Ahmedabad: City with a Past by Esther David, an Ahmedabad-born, Indian Jewish author of the historic Bene Israel community in India. The book offers her personal angle on the history of the 600-year-old city and its legacy in the present. In 2016, a special issue of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (3[1]) was devoted to “Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism”. Willi Goetschel and Ato Quayson’s Introduction seeks to make the case for seeing the two fields “as part of a historical constellation that has mutual filiations and genealogies” alongside the “historical nexus between racism and antisemitism, between colonialism and European nationalism, and between Jewish scriptural slavery and New World slavery (Africans in the New World sang of Exodus and Babylon)” (1, 9). The travels of the term ghetto discussed earlier suggest one such convergence.
Further prominent patterns across themes and categories in this issue include museology, material culture and indigeneity in New Zealand and Canada; language, translation and cultural politics in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, East Africa, Sri Lanka and India; questions of literary taste, competitions and prizes, publishing and book history, print cultures and digital platforms in East and Central Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Pakistan; anthologies in Malaysia and Singapore (short stories on Malaysia’s LGTB community; essays and poems by Muslim women in Singapore), in East and Central Africa (oral literature and folk/fairy tales), in Australia (science writing, Asia-Pacific stories, stories of drought), in New Zealand (manifesto poetry), and in Canada (fiction and drama on diaspora and migration); genre fiction such as the graphic novel in India, Australia, Singapore and South Africa, speculative fiction in South Africa and the Caribbean, the thriller in Pakistan and Australia; the environment, ecocriticism and animal studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, India, Sri Lanka and Canada, and Don Quixote, as re-imagined in India and Pakistan.
Interesting individual entries that cannot easily be grouped under the themes and categories listed above include: Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic, edited by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel, exploring the reception of 90 Australian titles published in the GDR that represented Australia as beautiful and exotic, yet politically retrograde, a failed utopia of Antipodean capitalism, 1-3); “Ecologies of Blood in Johannesburg Vampire Fiction” by Timothy Wright (exploring the “haemopoetics” of a body of fiction that sees post-apartheid Johannesburg as a laboratory for new forms of life which displaces “the genealogical poetics of blood that have traditionally suffused the colonial enterprise and its literature”, 384); “Hone Tuwhare and Keri Hulme: Close Reading as Indigenous Wayfinding” by Robert Sullivan (using “the ideas and metaphorical systems of traditional ocean voyaging to navigate the worlds of the poems as they are portrayed”, 104); “Literary Perspectives of Healing Practices and Approaches to Medicine in Chinodya’s Strife” by Coletta M. Kandemiri and Talita C. Smit; Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place by John Thieme (a study of a broad geographical and thematic scope exploring cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities in the work of Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch, among many others); Prison Literature: A Global Perspective, edited by Chhote Lal Khatri, an anthology of research papers on prison writers from America, India, African and European countries; “Postcolonial Endgame” by Mike Phillips, exploring the positioning of non-white writers in Britain today in light of new identity choices and kinds of migration; Tripti Sharan’s collection of short stories based on her practice, Chronicles of a Gynaecologist, and Venkateswaran Anand’s memoir, Close Encounters on Parallel Lines: A Railwayman Remembers.
This year, we are delighted to welcome a new contributor for West Africa, Olabode Ibironke, taking over from Terry Barringer, the first contributor for this region for whose work and dedication we remain grateful. This issue’s 2016 bibliographic listings for West Africa are of a slightly different format to the rest of the entries, partially due to time limitations.