Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage (review)

This is an excellent collection of twelve essays, plus introduction and afterword. It is stimulating, erudite, and very readable. Most importantly it has coherence and the links between the essays make this a very useful and worthwhile collection.

Part of the coherence comes from the fact that there is clearly a shared body of theoretical knowledge behind many of the papers. Key writers in the field of postcolonialism, such as Ania Loomba, Martin Orkin, and Jyotsna G. Singh (who also provides the afterword) are referenced, along with Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, and they provide key concepts that inform many of the individual essays. Furthermore, some of the essays cross-reference the work of 'co-contributors' in relation to useful concepts such as Jonathan Dollimore's concept of 'creative vandalism' (p. 59).

The premise of the collection is a familiar one, that 'Shakespeare has been an inexhaustible source' (p. 213) for all sorts of writers, performers, and producers since the 1623 First Folio, as Atef Laouyene says, and there have been all sorts of collections that trace and count the ways that he has been appropriated, reproduced, and transformed. What differentiates this collection includes the accessibility of the material and the kinds of discussion that occur within its pages. Tracking and analysing versions of Shakespeare from Cuba to South Africa to Australia has certain inherent difficulties in that very few readers are likely to have seen or have access to all, or even a majority of the productions or performances being discussed. Even if the plays are on film or digitized they are not necessarily likely to be globally available. The problem is exacerbated if the discussion is of local, short-term productions.

Here, however, most essays manage to provide local and specific detail within a more generally informative and informed context, so that even if a reader has not seen or had access to a particular production there is enough information and context to provide food for thought, and Singh is right to describe this as 'a richly rewarding journey' (p. 239).

The collection also celebrates and employs a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches without forgetting what the endpoint is, and the authors are at pains to reprise complex technical terms such as Gérard Genette's 'heterodiagetic appropriations' in ways that are helpful and explanatory.

It is also a consistently high-value volume in that, to my mind, each essay clearly deserves its pages in the volume. Whether it is Thomas Cartelli talking about Shakespeare and James Joyce, Santiago Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan and Ana Sáez Hidalgo on Salman Rushdie and Hamlet, or Maureen McDonnell on 'privileging an aboriginal presence' in a Sydney Company B production of As You Like It, each essay is worthy of its spot.

Craig Dionne's own essay on Carriacou's Shakespeare Mas is a fascinating investigation of how the West Indian island's children being taught English from previous centuries' textbooks of Shakespearian quotations, has led to a carnivalesque ritual of verbal duels, involving 'matches between men of different villages' competing to outdo each other in 'memorization and oral performance' (p. 37), and takes the form of a 'textual grafting' (p. 48) that challenges the notion of Shakespearian universality through making the words 'speak in an open circuit of reference to the individual's own worldly concerns' (p. 49).

Guerrero-Strachan and Hidalgo also successfully employ Bhabha's concept of a Third Space 'in which cultural expressions are neither metropolitan nor colonial but a product of the translation of dominant elements by the colonized subject' (p. 74) to suggest how rich the notion of hybridization can be in these contexts of indigenous appropriations.

Perhaps, as a criticism, there could have been more discussion of what 'indigenous' means, given that in specific local contexts it can be a contested topic. Perhaps, too, there could have been further debate about why Shakespeare's work seems so...