THIS IS A SELECTION OF MY ACADEMIC PAPERS (ESSAYS, JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS) PUBLISHED SINCE 2020. A FULL LIST OF MY PUBLICATIONS CAN BE DOWNLOADED HERE, OR VIEWED VIA GOOGLE SCHOLAR OR ORCID.
“MINING / HISTORY (SHAKESPEARE AND MINING IN SOUTH AFRICA)”
2024. In Scott (ed.), Shakespeare / Nature: Contemporary readings in the human and nonhuman (Arden), pp.267-89.
The mine dumps that have become part of Johannesburg’s shifting landscape trouble the Natural-Artificial binary, presenting themselves as sites of ecocritical investigation for artists and writers engaging with the history of this ‘city of gold’. They also invite South African Shakespeareans to reflect on the intersection of gold mining in particular, and mining more generally, with Shakespeare studies. Timon of Athens is of interest here, not just because of his bitter disquisitions on gold but because, as John Jowett argues, Timon is a miner, and the play explores the correlation between ‘the idea of economic man’ and the act of ‘borrowing and stealing from the earth’ – a lens through which we may assess the consequences of mining, including economic inequality and environmental degradation. The 1916 tercentenary celebrations in Johannesburg hinged on that other Shakespeare play centrally concerned with gold: The Merchant of Venice. In the next ‘anniversary’ year, the quartercentenary in 1964, the connections between mining and the institutional history of Shakespeare in South Africa were again explicit. With the Poet and Painter from Timon of Athens in mind, these connections demand that we address the relationship between arts patronage, the operation of capital, and the exploitation of human labour and natural resources in the story of Shakespeare in South Africa.
“FROM ‘ENGLISH NEVER LOVED US’ TO JAM AT THE WINDYBROW: COVID-ERA DIGITAL SHAKESPEARES IN/FROM SOUTH AFRICA”
2022. In Sen (ed.), Digital Shakespeares from the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan), pp.37-55.
In 2020, the shift from in-person performance towards digital arts content became a familiar and indeed an overworn phenomenon. It remains to be seen how this will affect performance practice in what we might think of as the post-Covid era. It is clear, however, that such a shift has not occurred evenly around the world; the political and economic factors influencing the digital divide pre-Covid have been aggravated rather than ameliorated. Scholars working in the field of Shakespeare studies may consider the implication of these factors in distinct national and regional contexts, even as we recognise that ‘Digital Shakespeares’ also facilitate transnational and global paradigms for production and reception. South Africa presents an acute instance of these intersecting forces. This essay considers various South African Shakespeare initiatives, events and campaigns in the Covid context of 2020-21. It traces a trajectory from digital fragmentation to digital curation and reflects on the implied relationships between the digital and the analogue, and the North and South.
“MINES AND MOUNTAINS: MINE DUMP AESTHETICS, MARIKANA AND CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN FICTION”
2022. Research in African Literatures 53.1: 27-44.
The mine dump, long a useful metonym for South African writers, has receded from view in ‘Johannesburg fiction’ of recent years. By contrast, in the visual arts, there has been a burgeoning of renewed engagement with mines and mine dumps. Does this tell us something about representation, and the unrepresentable, in these different creative forms? Mine dumps, urban mountains, are related to histories of oppression, to ongoing economic inequality and to environmental degradation, but they are still visually impressive. For about a decade, South African novelists have tended to avoid this paradox. One might extrapolate such a trend to suggest that, while in the visual arts there is some level of continuity – the continuation of a tradition – when it comes to fiction there has been a rupture, or at least a disruption. Is it that mine dumps are too familiar, that it has become impossible to avoid cliché in literary evocations of them? Or is the rupture to some degree coterminous with the Marikana massacre of 2012? Marikana has been the subject of essays, poems, long form journalism and non-fiction books, as well as documentary films, music and theatre. But it has not substantially or explicitly found its way into literary fiction. Like the artificial mine-mountains of the reef, Marikana’s natural ‘mountain’, Wonderkop, seems to remain out of the immediate purview of contemporary fiction. While Marikana might mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another in South African literary production, it is not (as yet) encompassed by or taken account of in the country’s fiction.
“OTHELLO SURFING: FRAGMENTS OF SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTH AFRICA”
2022. In Joubin and Bladin (eds), Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare: International Films, Television, and Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan), pp.57-77.
This chapter considers the ways in which “Shakespeare” is recruited toward particular narrative and thematic purposes in the isiZulu-language South African film Otelo Burning (2011). Set in the townships outside Durban in the late 1980s, the film is based on a true story about a group of young men who discover surfing as a means of escape from their material and historical circumstances. While, in one sense, this appropriation subverts the traditional invocation of Othello in South Africa (based on parallels between racism in the play and in the country’s colonial/apartheid history), the film-makers’ choice to “use the structure of Othello’s story to tell ours” risks reducing the play to an archetypal point of reference and reinscribing some of the false assumptions about what Shakespeare means in a South African context. The film nonetheless demonstrates that “Shakespeare in tatters” can be liberating for the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in a South African context.
“ENDINGS AND (NEW) BEGINNINGS: SHAKESPEARE AGAINST APARTHEID, SHAKESPEARE POST-APARTHEID AND SHAKESPEARE BEYOND SOUTH AFRICA”
2021. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 34:1-6.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/sisa.v34i1.1
This editorial-essay notes the passing of Shakespeare scholar Martin Orkin and the debates that were staged in the early volumes of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa in the years after the publication of Orkin’s Shakespeare Against Apartheid (1987), connecting these debates to present-day concerns relating to the “if, why and how” of Shakespeare in education - as addressed by one of the articles in volume 34. It then discusses South Africa’s Shakespearean theatre history, and that of the Maynardville Open Air Theatre in particular, which is the subject of a second article in the volume. The editorial-essay goes on to present other articles in volume 34 that explore Shakespeare in different African contexts - Mauritius and Nigeria - thus demanding some critical reflection on the journal and its purview (as implied in the journal’s title). Theatre and book reviews included in the volume are also assessed in light of South African Shakespeares and/as Global Shakespeares.
“‘DANTE, CAN I LEAD YOU?’ SOUTH AFRICAN STUDENTS WRITE BACK (ACROSS SEVEN CENTURIES AND A HEMISPHERE)”
2021. In Fanucchi and Virga (eds), A South African Convivio with Dante: Born Frees’ Interpretations of the Commedia (Firenze University Press), pp.97-103.
This account of the essays, poems and stories collected in the volume reflects on the authors’ diverse forms of engagement with Dante via the implications of proximity and distance. In what ways do these students signal affinity with Dante – his historical context, his writerly persona – and in what ways do they subvert or challenge the world view (or the cosmic order) represented in the Commedia? How does their location in South Africa in the twenty-first century, as a particular kind of temporal and spatial dislocation from Italy in the fourteenth century, enable their creative and critical responses to Dante’s work?
“ACCENTISM, ANGLOCENTRISM AND MULTILINGUALISM IN SOUTH AFRICAN SHAKESPEARES”
2020. In Lee (ed.), Shakespeare and Accentism (Routledge), pp.100-120.
From the earliest documented performances of Shakespeare’s plays by black South Africans to the present day, first British colonial and then white Anglophone South African audiences have evinced a combination of curiosity and condescension in their responses to the delivery of ‘difficult English’ in the various accents that can be found in the country’s multilingual and multicultural landscape. This chapter discusses various examples of this phenomenon from the 1970s to the early 2000s. More recent counter-examples, like The Taming of the Shrew at Maynardville (2018), the Kwasha! Company’s ErrorS A Comedy (2018) and the collaborative project Umsebenzi ka Bra Shakes (2019), complicate an account of the ways in which ‘Black African’ and so-called ‘Coloured’ accents have been recruited towards characterisation or caricature. Ultimately, it is argued, the best way to overcome accentism is to perform the plays in translation into South African languages or through multilingualism/translanguaging – although such undertakings have other attendant risks, ranging from versions of ‘blackface’ to the reinscription of language hierarchies.
“BURYING CAESAR … OR PRAISING HIM? SHAKESPEARE AND THE POPULIST RIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES”
2020. English Studies in Africa 63.1: 22-45.
DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1780749
‘ET TU, BANNON?’ shouted the front page of the New York Post on 4th January 2018, after some of Stephen Bannon’s private comments about Donald Trump had been made public. This was not the first time that New Yorkers were presented with the comparison between the US President and Julius Caesar: the previous summer, the annual Shakespeare production in Central Park had invoked the wrath of Trump’s supporters. Yet the president’s camp has itself indulged in analogies with Caesar, as well as other characters from Shakespeare’s plays. This should be all the warning one needs against the use of Shakespearean paradigms to try and interpret contemporary American politics. There are, however, many examples of attempts to identify Shakespearean precursors to Trump – ranging from Macbeth to Richard III and King Lear – in what has become a subgenre of media coverage of his presidency. Most of these venture a critique of the president-as-demagogue. Shakespeare has also been recruited by a figure like Bannon (whose Shakespearean enthusiasm is eccentric, but certainly not innocuous) into the ambit of white supremacist populism. Teased out, this narrative offers a cautionary tale for scholars in early modern studies, and prompts us to reflect critically both on defences of Shakespeare’s centrality in the classroom and on the practice of what Jeffrey R. Wilson has called ‘Public Shakespeare’.
“DOSTOEVSKY IN ENGLISH AND SHAKESPEAREAN UNIVERSALITY: A CAUTIONARY TALE”
2020. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 21: 51-64.
DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.21.05
This is the second of a pair of articles addressing the relationship between Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The first article considered the similarities between the two texts, using David Magarshack’s 1968 English translation of the Notes, before discussing the wider phenomenon of Hamletism in nineteenth-century Russia. In this article, the author focuses on the problem of translation, identifying a handful of instances in the Magarshack translation that directly ‘insert’ Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular, into Dostoevsky’s text. It is argued that these allusions or citations overdetermine the English reader’s experience of Shakespeare-and-Dostoevsky, or Shakespeare-in-Dostoevsky. Returning to the question of Shakespeare’s status in Europe in the nineteenth century, the article concludes with a critique of Shakespearean ‘universality’ as it manifests through the nuances of translation.
“KUNENE AND THE SWAN: TWO APPROACHES TO BIOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE”
2020. Recherche littéraire/Literary Research 36: 65-94.
This essay compares two recent South African theatre productions: John Kani’s Kunene and the King and Buhle Ngaba’s Swan Song. Both plays are framed, and indeed were made possible, by Shakespearean histories and institutions. Kunene and the King was co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2019; Swan Song was created during Ngaba’s residency with the RSC in Stratford in 2016. Whereas for Ngaba this is merely a starting point that provides a sustaining metaphor, for Kani Shakespeare becomes a leitmotif – intertextual references to King Lear weigh heavily on the play’s structure, plot and thematic concerns. Moreover, while Shakespeare (both Shakespeare’s plays and the story of Shakespeare in South Africa) features significantly in the personal narratives of both theatre-makers, it is only in Kunene and the King that this history finds its way explicitly into the content of the play. I argue that these differences demonstrate distinct – and generationally marked – approaches to narrative, historiography and the use of (auto)biography in South African theatre-making.
“‘IN FRONT AS AT THE REAR’: BLACK SOLDIERS, WHITE IMPERIALISM AND MHUDI”
2020. In Willan and Mokae (eds), Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi: History, Criticism, Celebration (Jacana), pp.37-59.
In 1916, Solomon T. Plaatje echoed an appeal he had made previously for black South African soldiers to be given the opportunity to fight in the armed forces of the British Empire, serving ‘in front as at the rear’. In 1917, over 600 members of the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) drowned when the troopship SS Mendi sank in the English Channel. Plaatje’s enthusiasm about ‘soldiers of empire’ – and his appeals to empire in opposing racism and injustice in South Africa – remained firm when he wrote Mhudi in 1920, but this had changed by the time the book was eventually published ten years later. What happens if we pay attention to these soldier-figures in our reading of the novel? In this chapter I argue that it allows us to explore the various ways in which the British imperial presence is latent or implied within the text of Mhudi.
“SHAKESPEARE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE: NOTES ON THEATRE-MAKING FROM BELGIUM TO SOUTH AFRICA”
2020. In Maufort and Maufort (eds), Forays into Contemporary South African Theatre: Devising New Stage Idioms (Brill/Rodopi), pp.313-342.
This essay explores both the material conditions and the historical-political contexts for theatre-making in South Africa by focusing on recent Shakespearean productions. To this end, the author pursues some transnational comparisons. His starting-point is Ten Oorlog, Tom Lanoye and Luk Perceval’s 1997 rendering of Shakespeare’s history cycles for a Belgian audience, later translated into German as Schlachten! (1999). The creation and reception of this work has echoes, twenty years later, in discussions around modernising, translating and adapting (or ‘tradapting’) Shakespeare in South Africa. ‘Shakespeare versus Shakespeare’ carries various implications: the insights that connecting Shakespeare in Belgium to Shakespeare in South Africa might bring, as well as the boldness of attending to the local without shying away entirely from the permutations of ‘universality’.
“SHAKESPEARE.ZA: DIGITAL SHAKESPEARES AND EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA”
2020. Research in Drama Education (RiDE) 25.1: 49-67.
DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2019.1689111
This article considers the opportunities presented by – and the obstacles preventing – the adoption of online resources in teaching Shakespeare in South Africa. Taking into account Shakespeare’s controversial place in South African education, it addresses the widely differing contexts in which Shakespeare might be encountered in the country’s classrooms. The author discusses his own experience of digital platforms in teaching Shakespeare to undergraduate university students and in developing the website Shakespeare ZA (http://shakespeare.org.za/), reflecting on the mutually informing relationship between digital engagements with Shakespeare-in-performance, multilingualism, reading practice and ‘literacies’ more broadly construed.