Thread by @eflcam

It's a little past afternoon but I'll be carrying on with discussion about Shakespeare, Prac Crit, and other exciting things going on in Cambridge! #EFLdecolonise

Ian shared some really excellent resources regarding examinations of race and culture in Shakespeare's plays several weeks back. These questions are often overlooked but are crucial to the the dramatic action of many of Shakespeare's works.

Questions of race and xenophobia feature heavily in such plays as Othello, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Caribbean scholar Kamau Brathwaite (an alum of Pembroke) has often spoken about his identification with Caliban in The Tempest. Caliban is the archetype of the slave who turns his borrowed language against his master.

This is amply demonstrated in Brathwaite's poem 'Caliban'–

memofromlalaland.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/kam…

I've also grown interested in cross-cultural adaptations of Shakespeare. There is a tremendous resonance that can be observed between his plays and the feudal histories of other countries.

Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is a stellar example of a loose adaptation of Macbeth in the context of feudal Japan.

Another interesting book I've read recently that addresses intercultural dynamics is @EdwardWilsonLee's Shakespeare in Swahililand. It traces the suffusion of the works of Shakespeare in the contexts of East Africa.

It was interesting to note that Anglo-American explorers often carried around a volume of the works of Shakespeare as a reminder of their 'civilisation'. Theodore Roosevelt described it as a soldier's ration– "the largest amount of sustenance in the smallest possible space".

English Anglican Bishop Edward Steere adapted 4 of Shakespeare's plays–The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens– into a schoolbook for teaching the Swahili language. It was entitled Hadithi za Kiingereza, or 'Tales from the English'.

With the influx of Indian labourers and communities in African cities, this critical mass enabled a professional theatrical culture to develop in cities such as Mombasa and Nairobi. Adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were popular.

Compellingly (and somewhat ironically), many of Africa's post-independence leaders possessed a love of Shakespeare's works. Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili during the period of decolonization.

The first African member of the Kenya Legislative Council, Eliud Wambu Mathu, used The Merchant of Venice to put the injustices of the colonial government in their own language.

Much later on, political prisoner Sonny Venkatrathnam smuggled a copy of the works of Shakespeare into the Robben Island prison in South Africa. Many of his fellow prisoners cherished the book and signed their names next to their favourite passages.

the-tls.co.uk/nelson-mandela…

Nelson Mandela's passage of choice was found in Act 2 Scene 2 of Julius Caesar.

Our set text for Shakespeare term is Cymbeline, which was recently adapted in Juba Arabic by the South Sudan Theatre Company. Instead of depicting a bloody war, the SSTC retold Cymbeline as a melodramatic, slapstick comedy.

Some scholarly work has been done on the South Sudanese adaptation of Cymbeline as well:

oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/o…

@EdwardWilsonLee argues that "Shakespeare can not be said to be universal in any simple sense" as "his global celebrity can never be fully extricated from the political history that produced it".

Yet, he also asserts that Shakespeare "now meant the poet of Mughal railroads or the Ethiopian court, of Swahili and Maasailand".

I'd definitely recommend his book to anyone looking for an alternative take on reading Shakespeare.