South African Shakespeare: a model for understanding cultural transformation?

Abstract

One of the framing theoretical reasons to establish what I have called a South African Shakespeare is the need to find a way to understand Shakespeare's presence in local literature that allows for a change of emphasis, given the colonial history of English literature in South Africa and elsewhere. With an awareness of the need to redress the imbalance of knowledges between the West and the Rest, and in order to break a simplistic cultural binary which posits “African”, colonized culture on one side and “European”, high culture on the other, I aim to draw out the South African in Shakespeare as much as the Shakespearean in South Africa, in order, ultimately, to raise the question: How does a use of Shakespeare — as a collection of texts, and as cultural capital, — affect a theorising of South African cultural identity?

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 15 2003: pp. 21-28