Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues): Import and the Appropriation of Culture (review)

Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues): Import and the Appropriation of Culture, by Lemuel A. Johnson. Trenton: Africa World, 1998. xii + 467 pp.

A must for specialists, this monumental study is invaluable for cross-disciplinary generalists as well. As Lemuel Johnson forewarns the reader, his concern is not exclusively "postcolonial studies" or "Renaissance revisionism" (1). On the one hand, Shakespeare in Africa demonstrates how the process of cultural import and appropriation unfolds in literary texts; on the other, it is the author's claim for his place in history, an exploration of his own hybridity. Simply put, Johnson's contention is that in confronting Shakespeare, the colonial and the non/postcolonial trade places in a sort of defensive action, "under the threat of an erasure of identity" and "on a gradient of dissimilarity along which we are forever falling away or else toward each other" (28; emphasis in original). Such careful phrases suggest how much personal investment hides behind representation. Thus, Shakespeare's works might seem a "natural choice." His works survived because they shaped imperial curricula when British language followed the flag.

Shakespeare in Africa is an astonishing study of transculturation at both the literary and personal levels. What Johnson calls the matter of "terrain and type in the 'still vex'd Bermoothes'" lies at the heart of a project whose "focus is on the reach of the utopian bent in the lands of America" (1). The so-called School of Caliban, which claims The Tempest's character as the epitome of the oppressed, and Euro-Latin American "Arielism," which postulates Ariel as the true hero, contextualize the ways in which postcolonialism may well engage the colonial experience, but only to suit its own purpose.

The originality of Shakespeare in Africa rests in its staggering scope. It takes us from Oxford to South Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Turkey, Sierra Leone, and the popular stage in Bombay, in a bold display that no longer recognizes itself in the imperial mirror-dance. Researchers trained in the logical casuistry of Western scholarship may find themselves perplexed by the lateral (re)thinking of the best and toughest passages. For instance, although the question of what happened with Caliban's mother opens the first chapter, it finds some answers on pages 72-92, only to be yet re-addressed on page 170. Likewise, Johnson's rejection of "Euro-Latin American Arielism" is explicit early in the book, but it is not until the last section of the first chapter that the argument is made directly. In the two long chapters between introduction and conclusion, the contention that all reading is hybrid acquires further layers.

Challenging notions of nationhood and hybridity, Johnson's scholarship is a fine demonstration of transcultural epistemology in the Americas. Triggered by his long Shakespearean meditation, Johnson eventually turns to his own poems, demonstrating the challenges as well as the limitations of identity politics, thus exemplifying, in the very process, the creoleness of his Sierra Leone heritage. His approach demands the dialogical convergence of private and public voice, personal and autobiographical mode, the historical, literary, and cultural aspects of human experience.

Scholars who read the first version of "Whatever Happened to Caliban's Mother? Or, The Problem with Othello's" in Research in African Literatures (27.1 [1996]: 19-63) will recognize the argument. But in the longer work, the taxonomy Johnson applies is at times stable, at times not. Enthralled and engaged as this reviewer was, she would nevertheless like to raise the following question: What happens when hybridity and creolization, these shifting sliding signifiers par excellence, are applied to cultures where identity politics play out differently? As a scholar who hails from Argentina and for whom a different empire "writes back," I find the issues revisited in a wonderfully stimulating way by Johnson's work. Immigration so completely changed the nation formation of many Latin American...