1st Edition
African Shakespeare Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations
African Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations uncovers the multidimensional inventions, synergies, and experimentations that have emerged from performative, political, literary, and conceptual encounters with Shakespeare and his oeuvre in African contexts.
Divided into three broad and overlapping parts, the chapters of the book critically explore issues of decoloniality and postcoloniality; nation-building and state corruption; history and memory; gender and feminism; translation and adaptation from diverse theoretical standpoints. The book displaces the emphasis on Shakespeare’s works to productively illuminate the multi-layered significance of African epistemes, politico-aesthetics, languages and socio-cultural realities to the practice and process of literary and theatrical intervention and creation. Building on and extending extant scholarship in the field of African Shakespeare, the contributions in the volume not only enhance knowledge of African Shakespearean creations but also enrich African Studies and Shakespeare Studies by opening up new possibilities for transdisciplinary dialogues and cross-fertilization.
The book will be useful for students and scholars of African Theatre and Performance, Cultural Studies, (Global) Shakespeare Studies, Translation and Adaptation Studies and Post-colonial Studies.
Introduction
Ifeoluwa Aboluwade, Serena Talento
Section One: Subversions
1. Social (Mis)Conduct, Yorùbá Moral Epistemology, and Wèsóo, Hamlet!
Lekan Balogun
2. The Politics and Political Aesthetics of Shakespeare’s (Re)Sources.
Michael Steppat
3. Ways of Retelling Shakespeare's The Tempest across Time and Space
Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong
4. Playing with the Un/Dead: Translation, Memory and the Politics of Gendered Identity in Femi Osofisan’s Wesoo, Hamlet!
Ifeoluwa Aboluwade
Section Two: Appropriations
5. The Merchant, the Capitalists and the Usurer: The Merchant of Venice in East Africa between Nation and Self.
Serena Talento
6. Refracted from the Canon: The Transmuted Form of Europe’s Ambassador in Africa.
Sola Adeyemi
7. Julius Nyerere’s Translation of Julius Caesar: A Question of Political Relevance
Eliah Sibonike Mwaifuge
Section Three: Negotiations
8. “You all did love him once, not without cause”: Shakespeare, Discourse and the Rise and Fall of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Oliver Nyambi
9. Shakespearean Drama in the Context of Crisis: Playing Out Language, Power and Politics in Zimbabwe’s ‘New Dispensation’
Tsiidzai Matsika
10. Shakespeare and Soyinka: A Fight Against the Rotten
Pelumi Folajimi
Biography
Ifeoluwa Aboluwade is a senior research associate with the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” and a Habilitation candidate in the Department of English Literature, University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Serena Talento is an assistant professor at the Chair of Literature in African Languages, the University of Bayreuth, Germany. She is also research associate at the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State, and affiliated to the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong is the director of the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre funded project “Künstlerische Biographien: Transkuturell” at the University of Music and Theatre in Rostock. She recently submitted her Habilitation project at the Department of African Studies, Humboldt University.
Oliver Nyambi is a professor at the Department of English, University of the Free State, in South Africa.
