“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)

Authors

  • Maurizio Calbi University of Salerno

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0005

Keywords:

John Akomfrah, Migration, Archive, Media Interference, Rhizomatic Shakespeare, Postcolonial Shakespeare, Home and Hospitality, Englishness, Richard II, Hamlet

Abstract

The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscape haunted by other stories, as a language that is already in itself the “language of the other” (Derrida). In particular, it will claim that Shakespearean fragments are often used in an idiosyncratic way, and they repeatedly resonate with some of the most fundamental ethical and political issues of the film, such as the question of England as “home” and migration. The paper will also argue that the decontextualization and recontextualization of these fragments makes them re-emerge as part of an interrogation of the mediality of the medium, an interrogation that also offers insights into the circulation of Shakespeare in the contemporary mediascape.

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Author Biography

Maurizio Calbi, University of Salerno

Maurizio Calbi is Professor of English and History of English Culture at the University of Salerno (Italy). He has published on Shakespeare, the representations of the body in early modern literature and culture, postcolonial literature (especially the work of Caryl Phillips), and postcolonial rewriting of Shakespeare. His most recent book is Spectral Shakespeares. Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2013; paperback 2016). He is currently working on Shakespeare in the French nouvelle vague, the tradition of “Prison Shakespeare” in Italy, and Shakespeare in social media. He is also preparing a monograph on “interstitial Shakespeare,” which uses examples of adaptations from different geographical locations and in different media to address current debates about the notion of “global Shakespeare.”

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Published

2017-06-30

How to Cite

Calbi, M. (2017). “This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010). Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 15(30), 59–75. https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0005

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