Import/Export: Trafficking in Cross-Cultural Shakespearean Spaces

Christy Desmet

doi:10.1515/mstap-2017-0002

Authors

Christy Desmet University of Georgia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0002

Keywords:

Global Shakespeare, Local Shakespeare, Intercultural Shakespeare, Glocal Shakespeare, Dobson, Michael, Wilson, Robert Kennedy, Barucha, Rustom, Massai, Sonia, Isango Ensemble, Globe to Globe Hamlet, Laura Bohannon, “Shakespeare in the Bush”, Orkin, Martin

Abstract

This essay examines the phenomenon of cross-cultural Shakespearean “traffic” as an import/export “business” by analyzing the usefulness of the concept crosscultural through a series of theoretical binaries: Global vs. Local Shakespeares, Glocal and Intercultural Shakespeare; and the very definition of space and place within the Shakespearean lexicon. The essay argues that theoretically, the opposition of global and local Shakespeares has a tendency to collapse, and both glocal and intercultural Shakespeares are the object of serious critique. However, the project of cross-cultural Shakespeare is sustained by the dialectic between memorialization and forgetting that attends all attempts to record these cross-cultural experiences. The meaning of crosscultural Shakespeare lies in the interpreter’s agency.

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Author Biography

Christy Desmet, University of Georgia

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer 1999), Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams 2009), and Helen Faucit (2011). Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, co-edited with Natalie Loper and Jim Casey, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. With Sujata Iyengar, she co-founded and is co-General Editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She continues to work on issues of Shakespearean appropriation and also investigates Shakespeare in New Media and digital spaces and the ethics of appropriation.

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