African Shakespeare (Routledge Studies in African Literature)

African Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations uncovers the multidimensional inventions, synergies, and experimentations that have emerged from performative, political, literary, and conceptual encounters with Shakespeare and his oeuvre in African contexts.

Divided into three broad and overlapping parts, the chapters of the book critically explore issues of decoloniality and postcoloniality; nation-building and state corruption; history and memory; gender and feminism; translation and adaptation from diverse theoretical standpoints. The book displaces the emphasis on Shakespeare’s works to productively illuminate the multi-layered significance of African epistemes, politico-aesthetics, languages and socio-cultural realities to the practice and process of literary and theatrical intervention and creation. Building on and extending extant scholarship in the field of African Shakespeare, the contributions in the volume not only enhance knowledge of African Shakespearean creations but also enrich African Studies and Shakespeare Studies by opening up new possibilities for transdisciplinary dialogues and cross-fertilization.

The book will be useful for students and scholars of African Theatre and Performance, Cultural Studies, (Global) Shakespeare Studies, Translation and Adaptation Studies and Post-colonial Studies.

Ifeoluwa Aboluwade is a senior research associate with the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” and a Habilitation candidate in the Department of English Literature, University of Bayreuth, Germany.

Serena Talento is an assistant professor at the Chair of Literature in African Languages, the University of Bayreuth, Germany. She is also research associate at the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State, and affiliated to the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong is the director of the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre funded project “Künstlerische Biographien: Transkuturell” at the University of Music and Theatre in Rostock. She recently submitted her Habilitation project at the Department of African Studies, Humboldt University.

Oliver Nyambi is a professor at the Department of English, University of the Free State, in South Africa.