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Cultural Mobility around Shakespeare's Rome: Mapping Race and Nation through Performance (Rome, Italie)

Cultural Mobility around Shakespeare's Rome: Mapping Race and Nation through Performance (Rome, Italie)

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Nora Galland)

ESRA 2019 Rome, 9/12 July 2019: http://esra2019.it 

"Cultural Mobility around Shakespeare's Rome:

Mapping Race and Nation through Performance"

   

Theatre affords cultural mobility to performers, audience members, and authors. Cultural mobility encompasses figurative transfer and physical movement (literally, metaphor); acculturation, the process of cultural exchange and transformation; liminal space between flexibility and fixedness; and new analysis of a “sense of place” or lineage (Greenblatt 2009). By creating new worlds in real time through spontaneous community-creation, theatre enables potentially new or unworldly racial and national categories. Since "Rome" is for Shakespeare already an imaginary space in the distant past, a mythos rather than a history, the ancient worlds of the Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and CleopatraCoriolanusTitus Andronicus) offer perfect loci for this kind of world-building and to investigate alternative ways of making or unmaking empire. Such imagined spaces can perhaps offer a way out of what seems like a global crisis of resurgent racialisms: nationalism in Europe, caste-prejudice in India, anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, and so on.

This seminar asks participants to consider the implications of race or nation on stage, on screen, and in installations, happenings, or other performance venues in Shakespeare’s Roman plays and how perceptions of race shift in different venues, at different historical moments, and even from person to person. Seminarians could consider, for example, Gregory Doran’s all-black Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012; the controversies surrounding Rob Melrose’s self-styled "Obama" Julius Caesar in Chicago in 2012 and what Donald Trump, Jr. deemed a "Trump" Julius Caesar at the Public Theatre in New York in 2017; the imbrication of race and nation in Cesare Deve Morire (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 2012; Bassi 2016); and readings of local productions that investigate how race, nation, and the concept of “Rome” resonate in different “liminal localities,” whether European, Asian, or North American (Matei-Chesnoiu 2009; Valls-Russell and Vienne-Guerrin 2017).

 

Works Cited

BASSI, Shaul, Shakespeare's Italy and Italy's Shakespeare: Place, "Race," Politics, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

GREENBLATT, Stephen, with Ines G. Zupanov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick, Cultural Mobility, Cambridge University Press. 2009.

MATEI-CHESNOIU, Monica, Early Modern Drama and the Eastern European Elsewhere: Representations of Liminal Localities in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.

TAVIANI, Paolo, and Vittorio Taviani, dirs. Cesare Deve Morire, 2012.

VALLS-RUSSELL, Janice, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, “Play Review: Titus Andronicus,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 94.1 (2017): 142–145.

 

Please submit an abstract (200/300 words) and a brief bibliography (100 words) by December 15th, 2018 to all convenors of the seminar.

 

Convenors:                               

- Shaul Bassi, Associate Professor, Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Italy

< bassi@unive.it >

- Sujata Iyengar, Professor, University of Georgia, USA

< iyengar@uga.edu >

- Nora Galland, PhD candidate, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France              

 < nora.galland@univ-montp3.fr >