 SHAKESPEARE
IN AFRICA
Import and the Appropriation of Culture
This complex work explores "constellations
of encounters and evidence of import in various
contexts, ranging from Oxford to the popular stage
in Bombay, and from North America's various negotiations
of its putative European ancestries to Shakespeare's
reception in Africa as compared with that in Europe
and the America's." |
| |
| "The esthetics and ethics involved
in the collecting of (other) people's cultural property,"
cautions the author, "can be a complicated
business. The rites and the rights of such collections
are complex....The power of any master(ing) text,
and of its translatability, can therefore become
occasion for faith or else for agnosticism, if not
outright apostasy--and this "within" as
well as across cultural boundaries." Along
the way, Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's
"Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist"
no less than criticism from the pages of the "Shakespeare
Quarterly" are used "to foreground the
ways certain folk with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare
's with them." Not the least of such concerns
is the gender-inflected question, "Whatever
happened to Caliban's Mother? Or, The Problem With
Othello's," which "resonates in Shakespeare
studies no less than in 'postcolonial' refigurations."
It is within such contexts that "import is
shown to matter in the esthetics of copy-writing,
, the economy of copy-writing, and the politics
of reconstituting other people's cultural icons
and monuments." We engage such activities "under
the threat of an erasure of identity," says
Johnson. "We also do so on a gradient of disimilarity...along
with we are forever falling away from or toward
each other." Finally we engage in attempts
at transfiguration, in (the perhaps desperate) anticipation
that some measure of "parity of esteem"
among cultures would at least be seen to have taken
place." In the end, and whatever the issues,
"they are likely to be urgently textured where
one is inclined to find value in that Walter Benjamin
'philosophy of history' thesis: that 'cultural treasures'
form part of 'the triumphal procession in which
the present rulers step over those who are lying
prostrate,' since 'there is no document of civlization
that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.'" |
| |
|
|
HAND
ON THE NAVEL
HIGHLIFE
FOR CALIBAN
CARNIVAL
OF THE OLD COAST
