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.
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.
