New book: African Shakespeare
The publication of a new book is always exciting - but for researchers, teachers and creative practitioners working in the field of Shakespeare in/and Africa, the appearance of African Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations in the Routledge Studies in African Literature series is especially worthy of celebration. Edited by Ifeoluwa Aboluwade, Serena Talento, Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong and Oliver Nyambi, this volume brings together contributions by ten scholars connected to the working group “Shakespeare and Africa: Literary Entanglements Across Space and Time” at the University of Bayreuth from 2019 to 2020.
Aboluwade and Talento have subsequently been co-investigators in another project focusing on African Shakespearean phenomena: a collaboration between the TCC at Wits University, the University of Bayreuth and the University of Cologne, supported by the Humboldt Foundation (read more about it here). They are also both TCC affiliates. In their introduction to the book, Talento and Aboluwade note that the various chapters explore “recurring and intersecting themes of decoloniality and postcoloniality, nation-building and state corruption, history and memory, gender and feminism, translation and adaptation from various theoretical perspectives”. The following excerpts from the introduction draw particular attention to considerations relating to interlingual and intercultural translation.
In deploying the descriptor “African”, this volume does not claim to be comprehensively representative of the diversity of national, cultural and political geographies that constitute the continent or the innovations that Shakespeare’s legacy in Africa has generated. However, it also does not subscribe to the notion that this excludes or even constrains its self-identification as a body of knowledge that is African in its perspectives and orientation. The chapters of this book focus exclusively on play texts, novels and political texts by African and African-descended subjects in African spaces and thus contribute to and extend the body of knowledge that centres African (diasporic) subjectivities, practices and epistemologies . . . The volume seeks to advance scholarship not just on African Shakespeare productions but also to intervene productively in Global Shakespeare studies as a whole by opening up novel avenues for diverse cross-border, glocal and trans-local socio-cultural and political dialogues.
. . . Chapters such as those by Talento, Mwaifuge and Balogun deploy the Tanzanian, Kenyan and Nigerian contexts to foreground the significant role that languages such as Kiswahili and Yoruba, respectively, play in national spaces that resist linguistic essentialisation and pigeon-holing. Furthermore, chapters such as Mforbe’s broaden the conversation beyond the African continent to dialogue with its diaspora through comparative examinations of Esiaba Itobi’s Sycorax and Aimé Césaire A Tempest (in English translation).
The subject of language is a crucial yet complex one in African (re)negotiations of Shakespeare. On one hand, this is because the field was heralded by (studies on) interlingual translations of Shakespeare’s plays into local languages, such as those by the South African Solomon T. Plaatje in the 1930s into Setswana, the former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s translations in the 1960s into Kiswahili, the Sierra Leonean Thomas Decker into Kriyo and the Mauritanian Dev Virahsawmy into Mauritian Creole, also in the 1960s. On the other hand, the ways in which the imaginative transcreation practices of African authors (continue to) defy the foundational values of Western-oriented inter-lingual translation discourses brought about a need to find new and apposite terminologies for describing and distinguishing their transformations of Shakespeare’s plays.
Ifeoluwa Aboluwade
Serena Talento
Language in contemporary African contexts and literary usage goes beyond mere linguistic conveniences and colonially inflected regional-linguistic delineations; rather, it is intimately tied to subversive conceptual and political ideologies of identity and social belonging, which is highlighted by the ways local languages and cultural expressions, practices and symbolisms are purposefully and disruptively deployed in African Shakespeare creations as the chapters of this volumes also further highlight. Thus, we have Aimé Césaire’s Caliban interjecting his conversations with the word Uhuru, the Swahili expression for freedom or independence, while also drawing on the Yoruba gods Eshu and Shango (see Chiangong’s chapter), and Osofisan’s Black Hamlet and Ophelia speaking the Ijebu dialect of the Yorubas in Western Nigeria (see Aboluwade’s chapter).
. . . Iconoclastic “uses” of Shakespeare vividly demonstrate the inherently contextual nature of translation as a socio-political practice that is deeply rooted in the context from which the text emerges and dependent on the historical and cultural conditions of its transposition. Both Talento and Mwaifuge’s chapter highlight how translations of Shakespeare’s works speak to and through the local context in ways that create new meanings autonomous from the original. These aspects become even more crucial and intense when the generated meanings are entrenched in particular political discourses that make the translation a potent resource to articulate trenchant political and social debates. Talento’s chapter delves into this by analysing two Swahili translations of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: one done by the then president of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, in 1969 and one by a Briton who had been resident in Kenya for a long time in 1971. Although both translations are embedded within education policies and academic debates aimed at Africanising and localising school and university curricula, Talento argues, their notable differences vis-à-vis their respective (socio-political) contexts of production, the agents, their literary prestige, and the mode of translation lay bare the multiplicity of takes on translation; in Talento’s specific case, prioritising nation-building goals, on the one hand, and personal necessities, on the other. This reveals how extratextuality enters textuality, thus activating a web of intertextual discourses and meanings that acquire an independent (after)life (in the sense of Walter Benjamin).
Further advancing the discourse on African Shakespeare in the East African context, Mwaifuge sheds light on the dynamics of appropriation at work in the translation of Julius Caesar into Swahili by Nyerere. He contends that this was carried out at a dramatic point of socio-political change and aimed at establishing the political philosophy of ujamaa, Tanzanian socialism and a nation-building project centred on notions of unity and communalism. In outlining what could be termed as “elective affinities” between the Shakespearean work and the Swahili translation, Mwaifuge clarifies the role of the translated work in the political landscape of post-independence Tanzania, a context that, he maintains, is fraught with uncertainties and betrayal.
Decolonisation has been one of the key political themes that has featured prominently in scholarly discourses on African-Shakespeare relations. This aspect was taken up by Steppat in his chapter, arguing that decolonisation needs to extend to Shakespeare Studies through the acknowledgement of the diverse political motivations that constitute the formation of any literary canon and constrain the kind of knowledge it produces. Through critical explorations of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the early modern scholarship that surrounds his works, he challenges the prevailing notion that traditional Shakespeare source study is apolitical by demonstrating how the process of literary creation and knowledge production in Shakespeare studies has been shaped by competing political interests and ambitions that determine which knowledges and cultural spaces are valid and which are not. He emphasises that the decolonisation of Shakespeare studies would enable non-traditional sources of episteme, such as folktales and mythologies, from non-conventional cultural spaces such as Africa to transform the field and facilitate epistemic inclusivity productively.
. . . Influence is always bidirectional, and sources are frequently multiplied; hence, it is no wonder that reflecting on and explicating the nature of the relationalities that exist between Shakespeare’s plays and their African reinterpretations beyond the limitations of commonplace conceptualisations is one of the conceptual journeys embarked upon by some of the chapters. Nyambi, for example, asks, “What happens when the formerly colonised appropriate Shakespeare and his logics of power are transported by and associated with British imperialism, even as that association is, for the most part, arbitrary?” Aboluwade suggests a non-heteronormative affiliation that displaces the Shakespearean literary forefather/ancestor from a fossilised position of a priori. Olufolajimi posits it as a relationship of intercultural encounter, and Balogun sees it as a relationship of architectuality (in the sense of Gerard Gennette) and self-recognition. Adeyemi conceptualises it as a relation of interculturalism and entextualisation, and Mwaifuge sees it as a relation of elective affinities.