Jyotsna G. Singh

Postcolonial Shakespeare Revisited

Postcolonial approaches to Shakespeare do not simply suggest a dethroning of the canonical bard, but rather they have opened up the works to competing histories of nation, “race”, gender and class within a plurality of sociopolitical contexts—the marks of the postcolonial condition. This essay looks afresh at these histories within the linked trajectories of Shakespearean and postcolonial studies, while exploring the valences of such terms as “early colonial”, “pre-colonial” and “proto-colonial” and their implications for Shakespearean critical pratice.

The postcolonial world

That an empathic response to testimonies can lead to altruism is a key assumption of much cultural research on trauma and witnessing, which prides itself on its ethical commitment. Most trauma theorists also agree that empathy is to be distinguished from forms of affective involvement that do not recognize and respect the otherness of the other, and which are variously referred to as sympathy, projective identification, incorporation, or crude empathy. While this caveat against imperialism and appropriation is meant to prevent empathy from turning into a closed-loop process, canonical trauma theory itself has been plagued by Eurocentrism from its inception, as it tends not to adequately address the sufferings of members of non-Western or minority groups. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges that transcultural witnessing poses for empathic understanding and ethical thinking, using both theoretical and literary texts as examples, and focusing specifically on Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. Published by McSweeney’s in 2006, What Is the What, subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, is a collaborative first-person testimony that tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war. I argue that in this book Eggers manages both to stay true to the continuing cultural demand for empathy with distant others and to defuse or counter the prevailing scepticism about the morality of empathic identification that tends to find such efforts hopelessly wanting. What Is the What does not resolve all the moral ambiguities surrounding transcultural witnessing, but it is unafraid to confront them and refuses to be paralysed by them. The novel harnesses feeling in the face of suffering while continually reminding the reader that Deng’s experiences are not his or hers to inhabit. Rather than solidifying an already existing community, it calls a community of otherwise distant and disconnected people into being for the purposes of alleviating suffering.

Placing Michael Neill: Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture ed. by Jonathan Gil Harris (review)

emotional nuances of the characters’ dramatic journeys, above all Juliet’s (such as Olivia Hussey’s performance in Zeffirelli’s film). Recognition that Shakespeare was working within a long tradition of rewriting when he adapted Brooke (and perhaps reworked Q1) shapes Weis’s necessarily brisk but illuminating account of the play’s landmark performances. Ignoring conventional boundaries, he seamlessly interweaves revealing discussions of major adaptations of Romeo and Juliet by Berlioz, Gounod, Prokofiev, and Bernstein and Sondheim. A concluding discussion of Tim Carroll’s experimental Old Pronunciation production at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2004 caps his edition’s well-told story of Romeo and Juliet’s vital modern dialogue between mainstream interpretation and creative reinvention.

Review of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (Directed by Anirudh Nair and Neel Chaudhuri for The Tadpole Repertory and Wide Aisle Productions), Zorba the Buddha Performance Space, Ghitorni, New Delhi, India, 3 March 2013

Imagine small, lush green slopes with tiny streams swirling between them, with shadowy trees as they are lit up by strategically placed spotlights. On one side is an open stage, covered by a thatched, canopied roof, surrounded by bamboo trees, and sloping down are two open grassy plots serving as additional performance spaces hidden off, yet not far from a bustling New Delhi highway an unlikely, but entrancing setting for a cross-cultural and bi-lingual production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This site, with a ‘‘new-age’’ ring, Zorba the Buddha, offers a unique ambience. Wide Aisle Productions and The Tadpole Repertory used an ensemble cast of 11 actors, for this very distinctive production. ‘‘Combining the rhythm and meter of Shakespeare’s original text with physical choreography and acrobatics, while performing parts of the text in Hindustani, (with an evocative translation by Tanzil Rahman), the play was staged as a promenade performance with the audience moving between natural locations within the venue of the ecovillage’’ (program). Shakespeare’s plays have been travelling far on the tide of globalization; some would consider them new aesthetic products for global consumers of culture. But this production of The Winter’s Tale belies any assumptions of commodification; instead, its cross-pollination of the local, native idiom, colour, and language with Shakespearean language takes it audiences through a rich cross-cultural and affective journey of metamorphosis. On the one hand it evokes ‘‘a transcendent work of death and revival . . . the redemptive world of nature, and the magical power of art’’ (program); yet, it also gives to Shakespeare’s play ‘‘a local habitation’’ in a recognizably Indian milieu. The opening scenes set in the King of Sicilia’s court take place under the canopied stage. The audience is seated in chairs and floor cushions arranged in a circle around a central, brightly lit performance area. We are all drawn into a shared spectatorship, not unlike the courtiers watching the main characters themselves. The charged drama of desire and jealousy between Leontes (Bikram Ghosh), Polixenes, (Ashish Paliwal)

Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677 (review)

Imtiaz Habib’s book boldly reconfigures the archive of sixteenthand seventeenth-century English history by uncovering an actual black population, previously considered tiny and insignificant, in a period “well before English black populations became known through the transatlantic slave trade” (1). Excavating documents from varied sources such as “legal, taxation, medical, and civic archives” (3), as well as records from parish churches within London and without and from royal and aristocratic households records, Habib follows richly detailed semantic clues about the presence of blacks within the English population: “hidden in the vast archives of parish churches within London and without, all through the Tudor and Stuart reigns, are voluminous cryptic citations of ‘nigro,’ ‘neger,’ ‘neygar,’ ‘blackamoor,’ ‘moor,’ ‘barbaree’” (2). While acknowledging the slipperiness of such racial etymologies and linguistic mutations at the outset, Habib brings to life, albeit in short glimpses, imprints of black persons in various roles. These include, among numerous others, “Domingo” “a ginny negar” who seemed to have some prestige in the eyes of his owner, dwelling in “the abbye place... the manor house of East Smithfield” of the “right worshipful Sr. William Winter knight” (and financier of some of the Guinea voyages), and who received a “black cloth” at his burial (74); Elizabeth, “a negro child born white, the mother a negro,” baptized in the church of St. Botolph (96); Sir Walter Raleigh’s 11-year old Guyanian boy, “Charles,” baptized in 1597 at “St. Luke’s church in Kensington” (2); the black maidservants who were a part of the retinue accompanying Katherine of Aragon (36); and “John Blancke/Blak,” a “black trumpeter” “documented in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII,” who according to Habib is “almost certainly” represented on the “Great tournament Roll of Henry VIII,” among the few visual images of blacks included in the book (39–40). Black Lives in the English Archives is an important study at the “resurgent moment of race in Renaissance Studies,” making a crucial contribution to our knowledge of previously unrecognized, cross-racial encounters and racial discourse in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England (1). In making visible the “varied impress of black working lives” in the period, Habib interrogates the historical archives in terms reminiscent of Ann Stoler’s observation that “we should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production.” (“Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance,” Archival Science 2 [2002], 87). Archives are inevitably incomplete and partial, as Habib pointedly explains: “The usual topics of seventeenth-century English history, namely the financial and political problems of the reigns of the first Stuarts, the English Revolution, the Puritan government, and the Restoration, do not relate transparently to the black citations in the seventeenth century” (121). In this context, it

Shakespeare's Sonnets (review)

interpretation that essentially defends the reluctant Adonis, the editors repeatedly explain his behavior by suggesting that he is not a young man but a “child” (58, 59), “pre-pubertal” (60), and an instance of “little-boy vulnerability” (60). virtually hairless cheeks do not establish a young man as an asexual child (as many adolescents desperately trying to grow a beard would aggressively insist); in any event, this analysis would have been strengthened by more attention to the complexities of age-related categories in this period. But such qualifications in no way deny that this edition is a major achievement that happily complicates our pedagogical and scholarly choices. Deciding which edition to assign or recommend to graduate students and advanced undergraduates will not be easy. Financial considerations may play a part; Arden is to be applauded for offering this paperback for

List of Suggested Readings

14.99. Which poems are included and the interpretive stances behind those choices may also help to determine which edition we suggest; in particular, Duncan-Jones’s commitment to the idea of a “Delian structure” is reflected in the fact that “A Lover’s Complaint” is paired with the Sonnets in her edition, while Roe’s belief that the connections between those poems has been overstated is reflected in an edition that prints the “Complaint” with the narrative poems. As scholars, we will want to consult each of these editions regularly ourselves, turning to them for their respective strengths. Burrow’s magisterial Complete Sonnets and Poems offers the most acute analyses of literary and thematic issues—although the other contenders are strong in this central respect as well—with a valuable if sometimes overstated defense of the poems’ significance. Among the many virtues of Roe’s major edition is his learned commentary on intellectual contexts and an independent challenge to the often-unchallenged links between the Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint.” We are especially indebted to Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen for their comprehensive and original work on texts, attributions, and afterlife; a wide-ranging and thoughtprovoking critical introduction; invaluable glosses; and much else that contributes to our understanding of these poems.

Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: 'Discoveries' of India in the Language of Colonialism

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin, nteds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.