Post-colonial Shakespeares, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Post-colonial Shakespeares e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Shakespeare and the post-colonial question. Shakespeare wrote when England mercantile and colonial enterprises were just germinating and European Colonialism was still in its infancy. Shakespeare celebrated the superiority of the ‘civilized races’ which led to the fact that he was used to reinforce cultural and racial hierarchies by colonial educationist and administrators who made him interpret his plays in a highly conservative way and construct his image to let him be one, if not ‘the best’, writer in the whole world. During the colonial period, he became the quintessence of the Englishness and a measure of humanity itself so that his plays were used to establish colonial authority. In recent years, Shakespearean scholars and critics working within postcolonial studies have analyzed the ways in which colonial and racial discourses might have shaped Shakespeare’s work. During the 1980s and 1990s cultural materialists, new historicists and feminists utilized the insights of Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and semiotics to reinterpret class, gender and sexual relations in early modern Europe and reflect on the dynamic interrelation between cultural forms and social power, and also considering the ways in which this social, cultural and literary heritages shape the contemporary world and particularly how Shakespeare’s work functioned in classrooms, films, televisions, theatre and tourist trade and how his authority became the subject of new critiques. Scholars began to examine emergent colonial discourses and relations during the early modern period and their impact on different aspects of English history, culture and representations. Even if there had already been books which examined these areas, Shakespeare’s plays bring new critical perspectives on language, literature and culture. In their analyse of The Tempest, Francis Baker and Peter Hulme showed how colonial discourse was central to the play’s thematic as well as formal concerns. Political criticism of Shakespeare and modern England has begun to show that is virtually impossible to seal off any meaningful analysis of English culture and literature from considerations of racial and cultural difference, and from the dynamics of emergent colonialisms. Moreover, one of the most difficult tasks is to balance our search for early modern meanings of race, colonialism and cultural difference while also exploring the contemporary imperatives of these terms. As we said before, Shakespeare’s plays reveal how racial ideologies continued to shape the ways the plays were interpreted, taught and produced, but also reveal oppositional practices, appropriations of Shakespeare and contests over the meaning of the plays. Very recently, the relationship between past and present has come under scrutiny, thus several critics have suggested that present day meanings of ‘race’ and ‘colonialism’ cannot be applied to the past. It has been argued, for example, that post colonial criticism emphasizes European domination and victimization of colonized subjects to the extent that it leads Shakespeareans into assuming that the same inequities between Europeans and other existed in early modern England. Shakespeare’s work not only engenders ‘hybrid’ subjects, but is itself hybridized by the various performances, mutilations and appropriations of his work. Certain Shakespeare characters have circulated as symbols for intercultural mixings. For instance, the Cuban writer Retamar described Caliban as the symbol of ‘our mestizo America’, America is unique in the colonial world because the majority of its population is racially mixed and they also continue to use the languages of their colonizers. Thus Caliban is the most appropriate symbol for this hybridity, which for Retamar is a radical, subversive condition. For others anti colonial intellectuals hybridity is a condition that marks the alienation of subordinated people from their own cultures. However, colonial encounters varied so hugely in different parts of the wolrd and at different points of time, any generalization about the hybridities cannot be universally valid. By the way, Postocolonial debates about hybridity are useful not only for thinking about encounters with Shakespeare the world over, but also about the encounters between races and cultures that were enacted in his own work and time. Not only Caliban but also Othello and Shylock enact tensions of intercultural interracial, or interreligious encounters. As Burton said, critics have not paid sufficient attention to how religious difference shaped early modern discourses of race and culture. He considers both Othello and Leo Africanus’s Geographical Historie of Africa and affirms that the two texts exemplify the divergent effects of colonial mimicry or hybridity: Historie strategically reproduces anti-islamic and African in order to undermine them, whereas Othello’s relationship with European Christianity allows him less space for the subversion of its ideologies. Shakespeare’s plays are important in the post colonial discourse because they regularly provided a vocabulary for theorizing the colonial encounters and psyches. He provides the language for expressing racial difference and human sameness as well as colonial hybridities. For example, Octavio Mannoni used the relationship between Prospero and Caliban to suggest that there are irreducible psychological differences between colonizer and colonized. Or Sachs who used Freud’s concept of Hamletism (a mental state of indecision and hesitancy when action is demanded) to suggest that there are no differences between black and white psyches. This provided new meanings of the plays and also metaphors for the understanding of colonialism and contemporary culture. Various critics have complained that not enough attention is paid within post colonial studies and theories to specific locations and institutions. Dirlik argues that post colonial studies construct a seemingly shapeless world in which contemporary iniquities are kept at bay. At the same time, as Anne McClintock and others have argued, the term ‘post colonial’ threatens to wipe out the varied histories of these places before the arrival of Europeans. These histories shaped colonial relations in each place. According to Brotton, reading The Tempest play through these neglected histories shows that Prospero is not the prototype of the 19 century English imperialist that he is made out to be and that the play reflects the belatedness and subsequent subordination of English forays into the Mediterrean and not the rise of English colonialism. These essays also help us not to read early modern colonial and mercantile ventures solely in terms of what happened later in history. To better uncover the connections between past and present you need to keep in mind the heterogeneity within each period. The concept of ‘race’ not only shifts in meaning over the past 400 years, but its connotations also vary within each historical context. Any equation of whiteness with racial superiority is indeed disturbed by Irish and Welsh people, while Jews trouble any easy congruence of religion and nationality. Both religion and colour can be understood as central but fluctuating markers of racial, national and cultural difference. Cannibalism, as Peter Hulme has shown, becomes yet another potent construct that places various non Europeans on the borders of humanity. Such discourse not only concerned inhabitants of Caribbean and Pacific Island, but also the Jews, who were accused of cannibalizing their victims. Not all histories on ‘race’ and ‘colonialism’ are identical; as Loomba points out, ideologies of colour were made even before. Prejudice against blacks predated colonial contact, but its specific forms and effects were transformed by colonial relations. Moreover, the term ‘post-colonial’ has become fairly controversial; because the hierarchies of colonial rule are reinscribed in the contemporary imbalances between ‘first’ and ‘third’ world nations, it is debatable whether once-