Sandra Young

Narrative and Healing in the Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission generated the extraordinary hope that individual testimonies would bring about national catharsis. This article asks whether narrative structure, shaped by the language and rituals of the church, psychotherapy, and nation-building, encourages an orientation towards the future that sanctions forgetting as well as remembering.

A Soliloquy "Lately Spoken at the African Theatre": Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821

In 1821 a small theater opened in New York City, billing itself as the American Theatre but known to most New Yorkers only as the African Theatre. After playing with frequent interruptions, it apparently closed in 1824. Although it was the first African American theater, and although William Brown, its impresario, is known to have authored at least one play, very little is known about the theater, about Brown, or about his lost play. Even Brown’s first name was disputed until recent archival discoveries by George Thompson. In the absence of texts, the African Theater has remained an obscure trace, a scholarly footnote to American literary history.1 On 4 December 1821, however—when the theater was widely known in New York City, and when controversy swirled around it in the newspapers—a new literary periodical, St. Tammany’s Magazine, published a text entitled ‘‘Soliloquy of a Maroon Chief in Jamaica.’’ 2 Its issues now extremely rare, the magazine has been unnoticed by scholars.3 According to its editor’s headnote, the monologue was ‘‘Lately spoken at the African Theatre.’’ Could this text be the earliest surviving work of African American theater? The possibility would be enough to give the monologue tremendous importance to scholars. But the text has more than antiquarian interest. Whatever its origin, and whether or not it was in fact delivered on stage, the monologue is an extraordinary reflection on racial conflict, and on the very idea of race. It may be described as one of the most radical statements on the topic by any American before the Civil War. It explicitly engages the language of scientific racism, which was only then emerging, and it challenges all then-current grounds for claims of

The "Secrets of Nature" and Early Modern Constructions of a Global South

Early modernity’s attempts at explaining human diversity are legible within the pages of the great compilations of travel narratives that claimed to uncover the “secrets of nature” and present them, on the page, with due scholarly seriousness. This article analyzes compilations’ accounts of the “novelties” of abundant new worlds and considers the mechanisms with which early modern compilations of travel narratives and natural histories set up equivalences between regions across the global “south.” These subtle equivalences had bearings on the positioning of far-away “new” worlds in relation to an expansionist Europe. Composite volumes like Sebastian Münster’s influential cosmography of 1544, Cosmographiae Universalis, established equivalences between disparate regions through their ordering principles and structural devices like woodcut images, transposed and reused to indicate very different regions in the world. These equivalences gathered strength in the English-language versions of Münster’s volume, repackaged for an English readership by Richard Eden and Thomas Marshe. This article examines these smaller English editions, along with Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the Newe World (1555), to understand how early modern English print culture helped to construct a “global south,” positioning the unfamiliar and far-off peoples of the “torrid zones” in deprecatory conceptual categories.

Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives

Summary Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivors self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies potentially enables attentiveness to the anxiety and vulnerability of detention survival. However, that attentiveness is undermined by theoretical abstractions that locate catharsis deep within individualised subjects and by attempts to imagine human connectedness across a generalised conceptualisation of trauma.

Narrating Colonial Violence and Representing New-World Difference: The Possibilities of Form in Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report

In tracing the stories—or ‘‘histories,’’ as sixteenth-century exploration narratives were called—with which expansionist Europe came to know its colonial Other, we see outlines of the habits of thought and the systems of identification with which imperialist Europe constructed its world. Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia has been read as a key text in the development not only of knowledge specifically of America, but of sixteenth-century natural history and early scientific methodology more generally. The Report itself does not claim to be compendious and is driven by Harriot’s openly acknowledged agenda of promoting support for the English colonization of America. But the interesting feature about the Harriot text, the thing that is given scant critical attention, is that it is really two distinct texts, published only two years apart but each strikingly different in its treatment of the alarming effects of the colonial encounter. When it first appears as a pamphlet in 1588, the Report is one of the very first accounts of the New World as a potential English settlement. It is presented from the start as a promotional text, written with the express aim of encouraging further

Editorial: “ Decolonising Shakespeare ?” contestations and re-imaginings for a post-liberation South Africa

In 2015 South Africans experienced a seminal moment in student politics and social movements, as previously marginalised discourses around the renewed call for Afrocentrism and the decolonisation of institutions, knowledge practices and public discourse gained new prominence. It began with the toppling of Rhodes iconography at the University of Cape Town, which quickly led to the pulling down and defacing of colonial statues situated on other South African university campuses and in South African city squares.1 The #RhodesMustFall movement saw university students and state police go head to head in ways that were reminiscent of June 16 and the anti-apartheid student uprisings in 1976. This 2015 movement evolved into the 2016 #FeesMustFall campaign which prompted the shutdown of university campuses across the country. Campuses had become war zones. Invoking the 1994 era political promises of free education, students called on institutions of higher learning to re-think, reimagine and revise outdated colonial systems of learning, a rallying cry under the term ‘decolonise’. While this moment in educational politics cannot be said to have evolved in the same way on each South African university campus, for us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) – a campus with a primarily black student body – it was a moment of confronting the intersection of race and class and financial access. The campus was shut down for over 8 weeks in 2016 at the height of teaching delivery time and we, as academic staff, became accustomed (again) to the daily smell of tear gas, to the sound of gun shots, and to the very visible presence of not only the police but also the hired private security company MI7 whose riot shields, AK47 rifles, and stun batons were highly visible when walking around campus. The aggressive presence of armed police and security for hire became yet another reminder that this ‘rainbow’ was, more truthfully, a nation in conflict. At the same time, 2016 was significant for another reason in Shakespeare studies. On the global stage, 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. How should a South African Drama programme respond to these two key aspects of this moment? As the Speech and Drama Department of the then University of Natal under the initial leadership of Prof Elizabeth Sneddon, Shakespeare and canonical theatre was conceived as “the tool of thought invested by man for the purpose of achieving a civilized way of life”.2 However, in its vital post-94 recurriculation, Drama and Performances Studies at UKZN has severed any major teaching relationship to Shakespeare; he appears now as a small section in a third-level module on “Postmodernism and Performance”, where students encounter a filmic interpretation of a Shakespearean text as a type of theatrical dialectic, and as the practical component of a section on Theatre in Education at level 2. However, in performance, Shakespeare’s work has had more staying power. During the years 2001 to 2010 his plays were staged annually by colleagues Mervyn McMurtry and Tamar Meskin who ran a sponsored Shakespeare Schools festival that attracted over 20 000 school learners from across the province. Performed at the Open Air Theatre, Shakespeare’s plays were made accessible and relevant to enthusiastic young South African audiences. The Shakespearean legacy of this Drama programme also includes Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha. The original poster sits in our graduate seminar room alongside the production’s archival material. Into this confluence of memory, history, politics and the call for educational decolonisation, we decided to set up a two-day colloquium at UKZN (30 September and 1 October 2016) to open up a space to talk, to talk back, to talk anew, and to talk beyond this phenomenon identified as Shakespeare. Our intention was to embrace contestation, and re-imagine what it might mean to “decolonise Shakespeare”. This special issue of Shakespeare in Southern Africa is a collection of some of the colloquium papers. We invite you to engage with this

Beyond Indigenisation: Hamlet, Haider, and the Pain of the Kashmiri People

ABSTRACT “Indigenised Shakespeare” offers one way to conceptualise the changes involved in localised reimaginings of Shakespeare’s drama, but it carries a complicated legacy. Indigeneity is not innocent of colonialism’s dubious hierarchies, however much it seems to privilege what came before. Indigeneity lodges contemporary cultural innovations within a timeframe that reaches deep into history, sealing them off from the chaotic temporality and political entanglements of a world that is simultaneously globalised and specifically located. This essay reflects on the value of this critical lexicon for the field of Global Shakespeare as it grapples with the tensions inherent in a model of cultural transmission and appropriation that risks perpetuating a set of assumptions about Shakespeare’s hegemony, even as it attempts to tell a new story, through a discussion of filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Hamlet. Haider explores the surprising resonances of Hamlet in a very particular time and place: India-administered Kashmir saw a period of intense conflict immediately following the promulgation of the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1990. The world inhabited by Bhardwaj’s modern-day anti-heroic Kashmiri Hamlet, a world where people disappear without trace and the military police torture dissidents with impunity, is infinitely more complex than a term like “indigeneity” could encompass.

Race and the Global South in Early Modern Studies

By reflecting on the turn to the “global” and its role in inscribing alterity in both the early modern period and today, this position paper extends the critical vocabulary with which early modernists might understand the operations of racism. Recognizing the construction of an early modern “global south,” I argue, brings into view the racialized imaginary at work in the period. As a term, the “global south” has developed theoretical purchase in recent years, but it also has a surprisingly clear foothold in early modernity. Early modern geography mapped a field of difference through the broad designations of cardinal direction, naturalizing pejorative assumptions about the peoples of the “southern nations” of the world. Today, Global Shakespeare’s openness to nontraditional Shakespeares has the potential to unsettle normative cultural practices and to bring into view the racisms that have structured global relations since early modernity. However, the field risks repeating earlier occlusions if it simply affirms, uncritically, the extraordinary reach of Stratford’s Shakespeare. This essay reflects on the emergence of an explicitly “global” Shakespeare in the pages of this very journal in the 1970s, when SQ editor John Andrews began to solicit materials that would enable what he called an “experimental” new form of Shakespeare scholarship based on “‘global’ coverage.”

Method or Madness? The Vicissitudes of “Global Shakespeare”

inspiring quotations. Schalkwyk likens this usage to early modern commonplacing, but the analogy is imperfect, since commonplace books typically served as references for individual compilers, whereas the circulation of Venkatrathnam’s copy turned its selections and annotations into a kind of coded interaction among the incarcerated. On the other hand, Schalkwyk offers his own contrasting readings of the quotations, and these readings signal the nuances, and frequently the ironies, not just of their original dramatic context but also of their twentieth-century political deployment. The imperative to keep this rhetorical advantage in check underlies a striking anecdote from Schalkwyk’s classroom experience, in which his shrewd analysis of a poem about death row inmates is overridden by a student named in that very poem. The survivors of Robben Island in the 1970s are neither unchanged nor immortal, but Hamlet’s Dreams does them honor by fastening their legacy, and that of readers and writers like them, to ethical and aesthetic debates that continue under the name of Shakespeare—“Full character’d,” as Sonnet 122 puts it, “with lasting memory.”

Envisioning the Peoples of ‘New’ Worlds: Early Modern Woodcut Images and the Inscription of Human Difference

Abstract The woodcut images that were deployed within early geographies and on maps helped to establish the racialized imaginary within which the people of the south become known. One of the first sets of images of the peoples of Africa and the ‘new’ world was the series of woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair, published initially as an independent wall frieze (1508). Their reappearance within varied textual forms over the next century provides an intriguing case study of the impact of textual structure and context on imperialist intelligibility. Arranged within a single broadsheet, De Novo Mondo, the Burgkmair images helped to fuel a partisan ‘new world’ discourse and establish equivalences between regions of the global south, many of them long known to Europeans.