Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (Routledge Research in Shakespe)

248 Pages·1999·1.11 MB·English

by  Thomas Cartelli

REPOSITIONING SHAKESPEARE
Repositioning Shakespeare offers a far-reaching assessment of how the
Bard has been appropriated within postcolonial contexts, especially in the
United States. Thomas Cartelli explores how Shakespeare is repositioned
as postcolonial cultures seek to renegotiate Shakespeare’s standing as a
privileged site of authority within their own national formations.
Cartelli provides innovative readings of texts and events that position
themselves in relation to Shakespeare, such as:
• polemical essays by Walt Whitman
• the nineteenth-century play, Jack Cade, commissioned and staged by
the first major American Shakespearean actor
• an essay on labor-management reform by social activist Jane Addams
• novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih,
Nadine Gordimer, a nd Robert Stone
• the 1849 Astor Place Riot
• films by James Ivory and Gus Van Sant
• a Shakespeare tercentenary masque performed on the campus of the
City College of New York in 1916.
Repositioning Shakespeare makes an original contribution to debates
about the cultural uses of Shakespeare, as well as to the question of what
counts as postcolonial.
Thomas Cartelli is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the
author of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical
Experience, which was awarded the 1991 Hoffman Prize for Distinguished
Publication on Christopher Marlowe.

REPOSITIONING
SHAKESPEARE
National formations, postcolonial
appropriations
Thomas Cartelli

London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1999 Thomas Cartelli
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-19134-3 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-19498-9 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-02565-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17384-8 (Glassbook Format)
TO MY MOTHER AND IN MEMORY
OF MY FATHER

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
PART I
Democratic vistas 25
1 Nativism, nationalism, and the common man in American
constructions of Shakespeare 27
2 Shakespeare at Hull House: Jane Addams’s
“A Modern Lear” and the 1894 Pullman Strike 46
3 Shakespeare, 1916: Caliban by the Yellow Sands
and the new dramas of democracy 63

PART II
Prospero’s books 85
4 Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as colonialist text
and pretext 87
5 After The Tempest: Shakespeare, postcoloniality,
and Michelle Cliff’s new, New World Miranda 105
PART III
The Othello complex 121
6 Enslaving the Moor: Othello, Oroonoko, and the recuperation of
intractability 123
vii
CONTENTS
7 “Like Othello”: Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration and
postcolonial self-fashioning 147
Conclusion—Decolonizing Shakespeare: My Son’s Story,
Children of Light, and late imperial romance 169
Notes 181
Works cited 213
Index 225

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book had its start in the essay, “Prospero in Africa,” that was first
published in 1987 in Shakespeare Reproduced and is reprinted in revised
form here. An opportunity to build upon this piece was provided when the
Shakespeare Association of America invited me to deliver a paper on
Shakespeare and postcolonialism at its annual meeting in Kansas City in
1992. The result, “After The Tempest: Shakespeare, Postcoloniality, and
Michelle Cliff’s New, New World Miranda,” was later revised for publication
in Contemporary Literature, Volume 36, No. 1 (1995), and has been once
more revised for inclusion here as a companion-piece to “Prospero in
Africa.” It appears by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press and
the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
I might never have heard of Michelle Cliff were it not for my long-time
friend and colleague, Jim Bloom. Jim later successively acquainted me with
Percy MacKaye’s Caliban by the Yellow Sands, Jane Addams’s “A Modern
Lear,” and Robert Stone’s Children of Light, while adding immeasurably to
my understanding of N adine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. Jim also offered to
read the entire manuscript, which he did with his usual impatience for slack
thinking and pretentiousness. I owe him the store.
An early version of Chapter 1 was presented at the 1994 annual meeting
of the SAA in Albuquerque in a session on “Shakespeare and Democracy”
which I organized with Michael Bristol. The chapter on Othello and
Oroonoko owes mightily to earlier work done on these texts by Margie
Ferguson among others, and not a little to the resources of the Folger
Library. The subject of Chapter 7, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the
North, was first brought to my attention by Michael Neill during our own
season together at the Folger, though my primary debt here is to Jyotsna
Singh, whose essay on the novel helped show me what more might be
done with it.
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