Shakespeare Against Apartheid
Author: Martin Orkin
Publisher: Ad Donker Publishers
Published: 1987
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13:
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Shakespeare in South Africa
Author: Rohan Quince
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1946, Prime Minister Jan Smuts was impressed by a Coloured production of The Tempest. In 1971, President C. R. Swart nearly walked out of an Africanized Afrikaans version of King Lear. In 1975, Kwazulu Chief Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi was inspired by a Zulu Macbeth. How did Shakespeare's plays intersect with South African history during the apartheid era? Rohan Quince briefly traces the theatrical history of Shakespeare in South Africa, focusing mainly on productions between 1946 and 1993, a period that saw first the tightening and finally dissolution of the apartheid system under the Nationalist government. Shakespeare was put to various uses to either endorse or subvert apartheid ideology. In this illuminating study, the author analyzes a number of key productions, placing them in their social, political, and historical contexts.
Kunene and the King
Author: John Kani
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2021-04-09
Total Pages: 90
ISBN-13: 1776191331
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'What lies beneath the apparent simplicity of Kunene and the King is a lot of moral, political and existential depth. This is testimony to the brilliance of John Kani.' – EUSEBIUS McKAISER South Africa, 2019. Twenty-five years since the first post-apartheid democratic elections. Jack Morris is a celebrated classical actor who has just been given a career-defining role and a life-changing diagnosis. Lunga Kunene is a retired senior male nurse from Soweto now working for private patients. Besides their age, they appear not to have much in common. But a shared passion for Shakespeare soon ignites a 'rich, raw and shattering head-to-head' (The Times) as the duet from contrasting walks of life unpack the racial, political and social complexities of modern South Africa. Kunene and the King is a vital play that combines the magnificence of classic Shakespearean comedy, tragedy and history to reflect on a new yet deeply wounded society.
Apartheid and Othello
Author: John Kani
Publisher:
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 14
ISBN-13: 9780863558306
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLocal Shakespeares
Author: Martin Orkin
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-05-07
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 1134274505
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American 'metropolitan bank' of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin adopts a fresh approach to issues of power, where 'proximations' emerge from a process of dialogue and challenge traditional notions of authority. Divided into two parts this book: encourages us to recognise the way in which 'local' or 'non-metropolitan' knowledges and experiences might extend understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their locations demonstrates the use of local as well as metropolitan knowledges in exploring the presentation of masculinity in Shakespeare's late plays. These plays themselves dramatise encounters with different cultures and, crucially, challenges to established authority.
The Robben Island Shakespeare
Author: Matthew Hahn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-01-12
Total Pages: 81
ISBN-13: 1474283896
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDuring the Apartheid years in South Africa, a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was smuggled around the prison on Robben Island. The book's significance resides in the fact that the book's owner, Sonny Venkatratham, passed it to a number of his fellow political prisoners in the single cells, including Nelson Mandela, asking them to mark their favourite passages with a signature and date. Informally known as "the Robben Island Bible", numerous prisoners selected the speeches that meant the most to them and their experience as political prisoners. In 2008 and 2010, playwright and scholar Matthew Hahn conducted interviews with eight former political prisoners in South Africa. Offering a vivid and startling account of the experience of these political prisoners during Apartheid, this extraordinary verbatim play weaves Shakespeare's words together with first-hand accounts from these men. They offer their reflections on their time as Liberation activists and, twenty years later, on the costs, consequences and whether or not it was all worth it. The play is published alongside a preface by Sonny Venkatrathnam and an introduction by South African actor, director , playwright and cultural activist John Kani.
South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity
Author: Adele Seeff
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2018-07-13
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 3319781480
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare’s presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare’s texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses André Brink’s Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical critique of apartheid’s obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Chapter 5 investigates John Kani’s performance of Othello as a Xhosa warrior chief with access to the ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers. Shakespeare in Mzansi, a televisual miniseries uses black actors, vernacular languages, and local settings to Africanize Macbeth and reclaim a cross-cultural, multilingualism. An Afterword assesses the future of Shakespeare in a post-rainbow, decolonizing South Africa. Global Sha Any reader interested in Shakespeare Studies, global Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and appropriation, Shakespeare and language, Literacy Studies, race, and South African cultural history will be drawn to this book.
Reading Revolution
Author: Ashwin Desai
Publisher:
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781608462728
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShakespeare's work gives hope and inspiration to the political prisoners held on apartheid South Africa's infamous Robben Island.
Shakespeare and the Coconuts
Author: Natasha Distiller
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2012-06-01
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 1868145972
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA unique look at Shakespeare's works' influence on South African writing In this book Natasha Distiller explores historic and contemporary uses of Shakespeare in South African society which illustrate the complexities of colonial and post-colonial realities as they relate to iconic Englishness. Beginning with Solomon Plaatje, the author looks at the development of an elite group educated in English and able to use Shakespeare to formulate South African works and South African identities. Refusing simple or easy answers, Distiller then explores the South African Shakespearian tradition postapartheid. Touching on the work of, amongst others, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Antony Sher, Stephen Francis, Rico Schacherl and Kopano Matlwa, and including the popular media as well as school textbooks, Shakespeare and the Coconuts engages with aspects of South Africa's complicated, painful, fascinating political and cultural worlds, and their intersections. Written in an accessible style to explain current cultural theory, Shakespeare and the Coconuts will be of interest to students, academics and the general interested reader.
South African Essays on 'Universal' Shakespeare
Author: Chris Thurman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-01
Total Pages: 231
ISBN-13: 1317052331
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSouth African Essays on ’Universal’ Shakespeare collects new scholarship and extant (but previously unpublished) material, reflecting the changing nature of Shakespeare studies across various ’generation gaps’. Each essay, in exploring the nuances of Shakespearean production and reception across time and space, is inflected by a South African connection. In some cases, this is simply because of the author’s nationality or institutional affiliation; in others, there is a direct engagement with what Shakespeare means, or has meant, in South Africa. By investigating the universality of Shakespeare from both implicitly and explicitly ’southern’ perspectives, the book presents new possibilities for considering (and reassessing) shifting manifestations of Shakespeare’s work in major Shakespearean ’centres’ such as Britain and the United States, as well as across the global North and South.
