Overview
- Focuses on key Shakespearean productions, two during the period of apartheid and one in a democratic South Africa, in order to explore the production of identity through linguistic practice
- Looks at linguistic history and how Shakespeare’s texts are harnessed in the service of promoting a linguistic program
- Combines a sociolinguistic approach with performance studies, Shakespeare Studies, the Shakespeare diaspora, South African Studies, history, Critical race studies, and cultural studies
Part of the book series: Global Shakespeares (GSH)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare’s presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare’s texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses André Brink’s Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical critique of apartheid’s obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Chapter 5 investigates John Kani’s performance of Othello as a Xhosa warrior chief with access to the ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers. Shakespeare in Mzansi, a televisual miniseries uses black actors, vernacular languages, and local settings to Africanize Macbeth and reclaim a cross-cultural, multilingualism. An Afterword assesses the future of Shakespeare in a post-rainbow, decolonizing South Africa. Global Sha
Any reader interested in Shakespeare Studies, global Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and appropriation, Shakespeare and language, Literacy Studies, race, and South African cultural history will be drawn to this book.
Reviews
“Seeff follows the long and complicated search for South Africa’s Shakespeare, cataloging the efforts over two centuries of a multilingual, multiethnic group of theatre-makers to use Shakespeare to articulate different competing versions of South African-ness. What she finds along the way will interest South African theatre and performance scholars, Shakespeareans, and sociolinguists alike.” (Gibson Alessandro Cima, Theatre Journal, Vol. 72 (4), 2020)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity
Authors: Adele Seeff
Series Title: Global Shakespeares
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78148-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-78147-1Published: 30 July 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08625-1Published: 24 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-78148-8Published: 13 July 2018
Series ISSN: 2947-8901
Series E-ISSN: 2947-891X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 241
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, African Literature, Global/International Theatre and Performance, Sociolinguistics, African Languages