Guest Editors' Introduction: Postcolonial Revisions of the Early Modern

Guest Editors' Introduction:

Postcolonial Revisions of the Early Modern

Bernadette Andrea

Mona Narain

This special issue highlights the ongoing revision of early modern texts and contexts by contemporary novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers who may be termed "postcolonial."¹ Complicating early modern and postcolonial studies through a dialogic approach to both, these essays focus on locations often marginalized in postcolonial studies, such as Turkey, Brazil, and Aboriginal Australia, while rethinking important touchstones for the field, including the Caribbean and India. This special issue thus offers a globally comparative view of the disparate effects and ideologies of modern colonialism by attending to the specificities of early modern interlocutors. As such, the first cluster of essays in this issue (by Andrea, Khoury, and Calbi) focuses on postcolonial revisions of the canonical early modern, with an emphasis on Shakespeare. The final cluster of essays (by Narain, Weaver-Hightower, and Racevskis) dwells on postcolonial recuperations of marginal figures and histories. The first cluster therefore rewrites the colonial center, whereas the second cluster seeks to redefine postcolonial boundaries. Together, these essays trace the dialogics of margin and center in postcolonial revisions of the early modern, whereby conventional icons become assimilated into anti- and post-colonial histories and otherwise marginal histories become central to rewriting the Renaissance from a postcolonial perspective.

Along these lines, Andrea's essay, "Dialogism Between East and West: Halide Edib's Masks or Souls?," recuperates for early modern and postcolonial studies the English-language play by a celebrated twentieth-century Turkish revolutionary, nationalist, novelist, feminist, politician, and scholar. Though relatively unknown to Western audiences, Edib produced a significant English oeuvre, along with her extensive Turkish one. Andrea argues that Edib's Masks or Souls? transposes Shakespeare into "Shake"—a homonym for "Shaykh," or Sufi spiritual leader. Since Western powers never colonized Turkey, it is not strictly speaking a postcolonial locale. Nonetheless, by representing the assimilation of "Shake" into Turkish Islamic idioms, Edib advances a model of intersubjectivity that challenges the orientalist gaze fixed on the Turks from the pre-modern era through the twentieth century.

Khoury's "The Tempest Revisited in Martinique: Aimé Césaire's Shakespeare" complicates conventional postcolonial readings of The Tempest by shifting to Césaire's reworking of Shakespeare's play in an Afro-Caribbean register. The difference between the two playwrights, Khoury proposes, is that Shakespeare problematized the colonizer/colonized relationship for his strictly English (i.e. colonizer) audience, while Césaire wrote for both colonizer and colonized. Yet, despite such differences, a striking similarity persists in how they expound the relationship of master and slave. Khoury accordingly provides a dialogic interpretation of Césaire and Shakespeare through Kojève's re-reading of Hegel to argue that Shakespeare was unabashedly Hegelian avant la lettre.

In "'Ghost of Strangers': Hospitality, Identity and Temporality in Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood," Calbi investigates how Phillips retells Othello's story as a creative re-appropriation of and supplementary "writing back" to Shakespeare's play. In The Nature of Blood, Phillips's previous ironic stance toward Othello as "a black European success" turns into a more complex response, which implicitly acknowledges that this Shakespearean "other" stands for multiple subject positions. The black general of Phillips's retelling subterraneously links with other figures of "dis-location" across time and place. These uncanny juxtapositions, Calbi argues, allow Phillips's text to explore the interimplication of various forms of marginalization and displacement from early modernity to our postcolonial present. However, as Calbi concludes, the text also suggests that the solution to marginalization and displacement does not reside in a rigid sense of identity and belonging, or in essentialist notions of "home."

Narain's "Re-imagined Histories: Rewriting the Early Modern in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh" returns to a more canonical postcolonial writer to argue that Rushdie's novel presents a re-imagined history of India through the palimpsest of the early modern...