Critiquing Globalization: Transnational Technologies in Arshinagar, Aparna Sen's Bengali Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet

Globalization, interculturalism and cultural appropriation: all these terms have been repeatedly discussed in the context of Shakespeare adaptations in recent years. I shall briefly examine these terms before moving on to the subject of my paper, Aparna Sen's Arshinagar, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. There are two ways of looking at globalization: one as a phenomenon that brings the world closer through trade and technology and makes it more comprehensible, the other as a phenomenon that disunites, accentuates inequity and disparity and erases local and indigenous cultures, and reduces all to the lowest possible denominator. Sociologists like Anthony Giddens (Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives) , Ronald Robertson (Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture), and Malcolm Waters ( Globalization) have written about the reduction of geographical space and, more importantly, the consciousness of the constraints of global space gradually diminishing, the influence of the faraway on the local and the concept of the global village. While modernization has been allied with globalization by scholars from the west in a positive way, scholars from other parts of the world have been scathing in their critique of the equation of modernization with westernization that globalization has brought in its wake. According to critics of globalization like K Satchidanandan and TK Oommen, the reality of non-western regions is inadequately examined in the formulation of the globalization paradigm. Rather than enhance knowledge of the lesser-known, globalization picks up a few elements that may be common or recognizable and constructs through them the fallacious picture of a world that is comprehensible and one. Satchidanandan argues that globalization is "a monologue of power," unlike internationalization, which is "a dialogue of love" (8). The reality of non-western regions is inadequately examined in the formulation of the globalization paradigm. More dangerously, globalization promotes what Satchidanandan terms "cultural amnesia" (9) in that it encourages a spirit of false association with the unfamiliar, the global, and a dissociation from the hitherto familiar, indigenous or local.

Just as there are more ways than one of looking at globalization, so there are different ways of looking at appropriation. There is one school of thought that damns cultural appropriation as a dishonest, disrespectful, and glib taking over of another possibly minority culture, against its will, by a dominant culture. There is another that does not see appropriation as merely a one-way street, an opposition between dominant and minority voices in which the latter are invariably victimized and silenced. Instead, it sees it as a dynamic interaction between two mutually defamiliarized forces, as Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin put it, that leads to new insights about both (Huang and Rivlin 12). The latter resists the easy demarcation between local and global, between "reverential and oppositional" (Huang and Rivlin 12 ). Sonia Massai, referring to Fredric Jameson and Mark Houlahan, warns against the facile binary of global as hegemonic and local as heroic (Massai 3) and chooses instead to speak of the porous boundaries between the global and the local, of how globalization leads to "a decentering and a proliferation of differences" (Jameson, quoted by Massai 4).

Shakespeare is increasingly marketed as a global brand through performance, cinema, cultural festivals, and academic events such as the Shakespeare Association of America conference and the World Shakespeare Congress. What Dennis Kennedy calls the eternal "malleability" of Shakespeare's works facilitates the adaptation of his works in many disparate cultural formations and locations (441). I should like to posit instead of the term "global," tainted as it is by notions of hegemonic homogeneity, terms like "intercultural" or "transnational" which diminish hierarchization, recognize indigenous traditions, and give agency to the non-western culture that adapts Shakespeare. While Kennedy is averse to the term "intercultural" versus global vis-à-vis Shakespeare performance, as intercultural performance includes material "that is not fully within the cultural competence of the attending audience" (442), I see the deliberate stepping out of one's comfort zone that intercultural Shakespeare necessitates as an enabling counterpoint to the easy assimilation of all things Shakespeare under the umbrella terms of "global" and "universal." The...