Asian Interventions in Global Shakespeare: ‘All the World’s His Stage’

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the ‘global bard’ as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard’s plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the ‘local’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of ‘West’ and ‘East’, the evolving markers of the ‘Asian’ and the equation of the ‘glocal’ with the ‘Asian’; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

Table of Contents:
Introduction : Poonam Trivedi, Paromita Chakravarti and Ted Motohashi Part 1: The Asian ‘Global’ and its Discontents Poonam Trivedi "Making Meaning between the Local and the Global: Performing Shakespeare in India Today" Ted Motohashi "How could we present a ‘non-localized’ Shakespeare in Asia?: Colonialism and Atlantic Slave-Trade in Yamanote-Jijosha’s The Tempest" Michael Ingham " ‘We will perform in measure, time and place’: Synchronicity, Signification and Cultural Mobility in Tang Shu Wing Theatre Studio’s Cantonese Language Macbeth" Mariko Anzai "From Cultural Mobility to Cultural Misunderstanding: Japanese Style of Love in Akio Miyazawa’s adaptation in the Cardenio Project, Motorcycle Don Quixote" Andronicus Aden "Something Rotten in the State of Dankot: Hamlet and the Kingdom of Nepal" Part 2: The Asian Cinematic and Digital Sphere: Democratising the ‘Global’ Paromita Chakravarti "Globalising the City: Kolkata Films and the Millennial Bard" Lingui Yang "Shakespeare in Chinese Media and Trans-sphere" Yukari Yoshihara "Bardolators and Bardoclasts: Shakespeare in Manga/Anime and Cosplay" Thomas Kullman "Shakespeare on the Internet: Global and South Asian Appropriations" Judy Celine Ick "The Performance Archive and the Digital Construction of Asian Shakespeare" Part 3: Historicising the Asian Global: Shakespeare as World Poet Supriya Chaudhuri "Global Shakespeare and the Question of a World Literature" Swati Ganguly "Beyond Bardolatry: Rabindranath Tagore’s Critique of Shakespeare’s The Tempest" Afterword: Michael Dobson "All the World’s His Stage, 2016" Bibliography List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Poonam Trivedi is currently the vice-chair of the Asian Shakespeare Association and has taught English at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, India. She received her doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK, and was the secretary of the Shakespeare Society of India from 1993 to 1999. Paromita Chakravarti is Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University, India, and has been Director, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University. She completed her doctoral studies on early modern discourses of madness from the University of Oxford, UK. Ted Motohashi is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Tokyo University of Economics, Japan. He received his DPhil in literature from the University of York, UK, in 1995. He is a leading translator into Japanese of the works by Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Rey Chow, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, among others.