Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel

Description

This volume gives Asia’s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical structures that determine Shakespeare studies today, close analysis of Shakespeare’s Asian journeys, critical encounters, cultural geographies, and the political complexions of these negotiations reveal perspectives different to the European. Exploring what Shakespeare has done to Asia along with what Asia has done with Shakespeare, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare helps articulate Asianess, unfolding Asia’s past, reflecting Asia’s present, and projecting Asia’s future. This is achieved by forgoing the myth of the Bard’s universality, bypassing the authenticity test, avoiding merely descriptive or even ethnographic accounts, and using caution when applying Western theoretical frameworks. Many of the productions studied in this volume are brought to critical attention for the first time, offering new methodologies and approaches across disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, geopolitics, religion, postcolonial studies, psychology, translation theory, film studies, and others. The volume explores a range of examples, from exquisite productions infused with ancient aesthetic traditions to popular teen manga and television drama, from state-dictated appropriations to radical political commentaries in areas including Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. This book goes beyond a showcasing of Asian adaptations in various languages, styles, and theatre traditions, and beyond introductory essays intended to help an unknowing audience appreciate Asian performances, developing a more inflected interpretative dialogue with other areas of Shakespeare studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Preface: On Memorials Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: An Introduction PART I: Re-Defining the Field of Asian Shakespeare 1 The Augmentation of the Indies: An Archipelagic Approach to Asian and Global Shakespeare 2 Shakespeare’s Long Journey to Japan: His Contribution to Her Modernization and Cultural Exchange 3 Unraveling Hamlet’s Spiritual and Sexual Journeys: An Inter-critical Detour via the Gita and Gandhi 4 Shakespeare’s Asian Journey or “White Mask, Black Handkerchief”: A Case Study for Translation Theory in Miyagi Satoshi’s “Mugen-Noh” Othello and Omar Porras’s “Bilingual” Romeo and Juliet PART II: Shakespeare and Asian Politics 5 “I May Be Straight, Though They Themselves Be Bevel”: Taiwan’s Early Shakespeare 6 The Great General and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 7 Political Shakespeare in Korea: Hamlet as a Subversive Cultural Text in the 1980s 8 Hijacking Shakespeare: The Three Faces of Indonesian Julius Caesars PART III: Shakespeare and Asian Identity 9 Shakespeare as Cultural Capital: Its Rise, Fall, and Renaissance in Philippine Elite Education 10 Makyung Titis Sakti: Reflections on Malay Traditional Performance, Culture and the Malay Worldview through an Adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream 11 A Journeying Shakespeare, or Adjourning Shakespeare: Making (Foreign) Shakespeare in Seoul PART IV: Asian Shakespeare and Pop Culture 12 Pleasurable Errors and Erroneous Pleasures: Renegotiating Shakespearean Romance in Three Indian Films 13 “The Very Basics for All of Us”: Fragments of Shakespeare in Japanese Anime and Manga List of Contributors Index of Shakespeare’s Plays Subject Index