David Macfarlane
POST-COLONIAL SHAKESPEARES edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (Routledge)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was English, and the Best Word was Shakespeare. In him the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory …
Or so generations of school and university students have been taught, in one form or another. But the Authorised Version of William Shakespeare has been in deep trouble for many years. In South Africa, Martin Orkin struck the first and still the most decisive blow against bardolatry, in his book Shakespeare against Apartheid (1987) and in numerous articles in the most prestigious Shakespeare journals worldwide.
Orkin argued that traditional uses of Shakespeare in South African education promoted passive acceptance of the prevailing social order by their collaboration, in effect, with apartheid education’s aim of encouraging submission to relationships of domination and subordination. The Authorised Shakespeare never fundamentally interrogated dominant, hierarchical arrangements of race or gender, class or sexuality, state or nation; it dealt rather in apolitical, ahistorical, universal truths (vaguely defined) – which, paradoxically, only a select few possessed sufficient sensitivity (or something) to apprehend.
In a particularly enlightening move, Orkin considered specific analogies between early modern (16th- and 17th- century) England and colonial and apartheid South Africa. The politics of land in King Lear resonated with the history of dispossession in this country; the tactics of an illegitimate and murderous ruling group in Hamlet illuminated (and were illuminated by) the practices of the apartheid state, for example.
For South African traditionalists humming along to Shakespearean hymns of truth and beauty and order, this was an argument to harrow up souls and freeze young blood. Whereas overseas reviewers registered the importance of Shakespeare against Apartheid, and treated it with seriousness and admiration, local reviewers – with one or two exceptions – trashed it. They were “loath to see Shakespeare connected with politics at all, never mind with South African politics”, suggests one commentator.
The essays in Post-Colonial Shakespeare were first presented at a conference in 1996 hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand. Given Shakespeare’s traditional status as the jewel in the crown of English literature (Englit), it is indeed, as the editors suggest, noteworthy that the conference was organised not by the university’s English department, but by members from a variety of departments, Orkin himself being the sole representative of English.
“This is perhaps as good an indication as any that in so many `non-metropolitan’ contexts, Shakespeare takes on a vitality outside of English departments, whose members are more prone than others to present a moribund, ossified version of the `Bard of Avon’ and his high-cultural legacy,” observe Ania Loomba and Orkin in their wide-ranging introduction, one that will be as helpful to the post-colonial specialists as to anyone wanting to know what’s going on in post-colonial theory these days.
It is equally noteworthy that, without Orkin, the conference could not possibly have taken place – not, anyway, in the spectacularly successful form it did, with more than 60 of the biggest names in the business from South Africa and abroad participating. Since a running question both at the conference and now in Post- Colonial Shakespeares concerns the future of Shakespeare studies, especially in formerly colonised countries, it’s also pertinent to observe that most of the host university’s English department stayed away from the conference.
This absence gave startlingly precise form to one of Orkin’s arguments 10 years earlier in Shakespeare against Apartheid: confronted with challenges to the Authorised Version of Shakespeare, and for that matter of Englit itself, South African traditionalists tend to ignore them.
This might have something to do with Englit’s persistent anxiety that it is undervalued in the modern world: faculties of mining engineering, say, don’t characteristically manifest this concern. Even so, the rational basis of this anxiety is arguable, but it is one that has made 20th-century literary culture “succumb easily to the temptation to assert that the writers it features are sages whose work transcends history and politics”, as one critic has argued. And, at a stroke, the study of literature becomes pointless. It is ironical that the local keepers of the Englit flame might have been, and perhaps still are, doing more than anyone to extinguish it.
Post-Colonial Shakespeares reproduces only a small selection of the conference papers, with many superb contributions necessarily omitted. Even so, the international range of the conference is reflected in the book’s 13 essays: four from South Africa, three apiece from Britain and the United States, and one each from India, New Zealand and Israel.
Each of the 13 is a marvel of scholarship and readability. And, even when South Africa is not the overt focus, the essays connect incisively and consistently with fraught areas of contemporary debate: race, educational transformation, nation- building, an “African renaissance”, land ownership, gender and sexual oppression …
Post-colonial theory is not primarily a literary matter in origin or in scope; so what such theory has to do with literature in general or Shakespeare in particular is the book’s appropriate and recurring question. The editors note that the past decade’s investigations of interactions between colonialism and Shakespeare have shown how Anglo-American literary scholarship has for 200 years “offered a Shakespeare who celebrated the superiority of the `civilised races’, and that … colonial educationists and administrators used this Shakespeare to reinforce cultural and racial hierarchies … Thus the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays were both derived from and used to establish colonial authority.”
>From this perspective, the controversial term “post-colonial” can simply signify diverse ways of combating colonialism and its legacies. But one of the most impressive qualities of these essays is the way they confront the most vulnerable, contested parts of post- colonial theorising. All the contributors are aware of Arif Dirlik’s contention that, especially in the hands of some metropolitan academics (distant in every sense from, say, Third World realities), “post-colonial” is too often used to flatten out the varied histories of the locations to which it is applied. The term can also keep at a comfortable distance more sharply challenging terminology, such as “imperialism”, “geopolitics” and “capitalism”.
Loomba’s treatment of hybridity is exemplary in this regard. The term denotes a range of mixings – psychological and physical – generated by colonial encounters. The idea of hybridity is potentially radical in offering a way beyond the fixed oppositions of colonial discourses (civilisation and savagery, colonialism and its others). But only potentially: Loomba argues that since colonial encounters differed according to location and period, so too did hybridities. To ignore that is to traffic in an updated form of colonialist homogenising (“they” are all the same …).
She considers an adaptation of Othello into Kathakali, a dance form indigenous to the south-western coast of India. Initially interested in what Kathakali was doing to Shakespeare, she came to ask the reverse question, and remarks that the Kathakali Othello forced her to recognise how it “provincialised” Shakespeare. (She draws here on Dipesh Chakrabarty, who calls on historians of India to “provincialise Europe” by shedding Eurocentric historical categories. Orkin’s essay illuminatingly considers the same call in relation to South Africa.)
The “African renaissance” debate could well benefit from the sort of attention given by Avraham Oz and Terence Hawkes to early modern English nationalism. Both expose strains, anxieties and barbarities in that nationalist project, with Oz relating these to modern Israel and Hawkes considering the project’s contemporary equivalent, the idea of “Great Britain”.
Hawkes uses the Henry IV to V cycle to focus on England’s attempts at national self-definition via its lengthy project of subduing and assimilating Wales politically, culturally and even linguistically: the word “Welsh”, he notes, “derives from the Old English waelisc, meaning, brutally and dismissively, `foreign'”.
Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Derek Hanekom has a starring role in Nicholas Visser’s examination of King Lear. Visser shows how the play captures a transformation in ways of conceiving of land, one that leads to the modern idea private property: “So thoroughly naturalised has the notion of private property become that today we find it difficult to imagine any other sort of property relation.”
Not even new South African legislation seeking to redress historical inequities in ownership of and access to land manages this: it simply wants to extend rights of private ownership to more people. Visser argues that this leaves vital questions unanswered: for example, why should people who have occupied land for generations now have to purchase it?
Does Shakespeare have any future in South African education? Orkin and David Johnson both address this question, with Orkin arguing that Shakespeare can be used in ways that are enabling, in providing possible historical perspectives and frames for our own contemporaneity. Visser’s essay could be seen as a superb example of Orkin’s case; as could the essays by Margo Hendricks and Kim Hall, which respectively use The Rape of Lucrece and the sonnets to suggest how instabilities in modern ideas of race and ethnicity derive from 16th- and 17th-century European ideologies.
Johnson, though, wonders how much control Shakespeareans will have over syllabus decisions. With careful and historically informed attention to matters conventionally thought of as extra- literary, he suggests that the World Bank, which is heavily promoting scientific and vocational training, has come to replace the British Colonial Office as the chief determinant of African educational priorities.
This has major implications. As Johnson puts it, “Whereas the choice for African university teachers in literature departments in the 1960s might have been between Shakespeare and [Wole] Soyinka, in the 1990s much smaller literature departments are likely to watch university administrators make choices between Soyinka (with Shakespeare as a possible ally) and applied electronics.” It’s a sobering thought.
What, then, of the Authorised Version of Shakespeare and of Englit? As already noted, traditionalists start choking on their iambic pentameters when you try to connect literature and politics. Despite this, Jonathan Dollimore contends that the left has won that battle – intellectually, if not always politically. In a searingly brilliant essay, he argues that the real threat now comes from attempts to aestheticise politics (rather than the aesthetic escape from it), evident in much post- modernism.
Dollimore warns against a new parochialism on which post-modernism thrives – “that self-absorbed, inward- looking and relatively insulated existence characteristic of intellectual urban life, and which reminds us once again that material conditions profoundly influence not only the direction of our thought but the very structures of what it includes and excludes, of what is thinkable and what is not”. Whether South African educators want to discard Shakespeare or celebrate him, they have compelling historical reasons for heeding this warning.
Professor Martin Orkin now works at the University of Haifa, Israel