Books, books, books
At the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre we are always excited to find out about, learn from, promote and share the work of our affiliates - a quite remarkable group of scholars and practitioners whose work is of global significance and local relevance. So we thought we’d end the year by highlighting some of the books published in 2021 by TCC affiliates.
Alexa Alice Joubin teaches in the English Department at George Washington University, where she serves as founding co-Director of the Digital Humanities Institute. She is also the founding co-Director of Global Shakespeares, an open-access performance video archive. In her various books, articles and essays, Joubin writes about cultural globalisation, Shakespeare, race and gender, primarily in the context of film and theatre adaptations.
Joubin’s new book, Shakespeare and East Asia, is the first to undertake a comparative study of Shakespeare on stage and screen in various East Asian contexts (including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore). It tackles themes such as gender, race, parody, transgender adaptations and unexpected but deep connections between Asian and Anglophone performance cultures.
You’ll find Akira Kurosawa and George Lucas; Chee Kong Cheah’s Chicken Rice War (2009) as a parody of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996); Hamlet, Ophelia and Korean “flower boys” in Lee Joon-ik’s The King and the Clown (2005); Kabuki, Noh, anime film and Asian-American theatre; Chinese wuxia and kungfu films; Tibetan film; Taiwanese Beijing Opera; British East Asian theatre; Korean t’alch’um masked-dance drama . . . and much more!
Ayanna Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), one of the world’s leading institutions when it comes to Shakespeare and early modern studies. Her work continues to shape the field, inspiring researchers, teachers and theatre makers engaging with Shakespeare’s plays.
2021 saw the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, which she edited. The collection gathers the work of twenty scholars, undertaking an intersectional approach to its subject matter and placing a strong emphasis on performance.
Thompson’s Blackface was also published this year in Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series. The book draws on her research into the history of Shakespeare and blackface on stage and screen, but offers a much broader analysis of this phenomenon that explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. Why, after all, are there still so many examples of people “doing” blackface?
Ruben Espinosa recently joined the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as Associate Director - we told you ACMRS was the place to be!
His latest book, Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism, “examines Shakespeare in relation to conversations that interrogate the vulnerability of Black and brown people amid oppressive structures that aim to devalue their worth. By focusing on the way these individuals are racialized, politicized, policed and often violated in our contemporary world, it casts light on dimensions of Shakespeare’s work that afford us a better understanding of our ethical responsibilities in the face of such brutal racism.”
Starting with an emphasis on “vulnerable bodies”, Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism covers topics ranging from white nationalism and different forms of complicity in racist paradigms to the militarisation of the US-Mexico border, anti-immigrant laws, inequities in healthcare and safety for women of color, police killings and the mistreatment of Syrian refugees.
Look out for Espinosa’s next book, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera.
We started the year with a post about two new books by Sol Plaatje experts Brian Willan and Sabata-Mpho Mokae (the TCC owes its name and aspects of its intellectual project to Plaatje’s legacy - so as you can imagine, we are very interested in scholarship on his life and work).
First there was Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: History, Criticism, Celebration (published by Jacana in 2020 and by Boydell & Brewer in 2021). Willan and Mokae also co-edited Sol T. Plaatje: A life in letters for Historical Publications Southern Africa (HiPSA). Then, in 2021, Jacana published a new edition of Mhudi with an introduction by Mokae.
In other book news, Willan and Mokae recently received a South African Literary Award (SALA) for Sol T. Plaatje: A Life in Letters, winning the Creative Non-Fiction Category in 2021.
We can’t wait to see what this redoubtable duo will do next!
And finally . . . to finish on another non-Shakespearean note (because the TCC believes that Shakespeare is decidedly not the be-all and the end-all of our conversations) . . .
Naomi Nkealah is a lecturer in English in the School of Education at Wits University. With Obioma Nnaemeka of Indiana University, she has co-edited Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film for Routledge’s “Contemporary Africa” series. This collection of fifteen essays uses the lens of African and diaspora literature and film to explore how the practice of gendered violence breaches the human rights of women, children and minority groups.
The book is divided into four parts:
I. The Violence of Language in Gendered Spaces
II. Sexualities, Cultures and Exclusions
III. Subverting Stories of War
IV. Re-reading Trauma and Dehumanisation.