Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter

The chapters in this book constitute a timely response to an important moment for early modern cultural studies: the academy has been called to attend to questions of social justice. It requires a revision of the critical lexicon to be able to probe the relationship between Shakespeare studies and the intractable forms of social injustice that infuse cultural, political and economic life. This volume helps us to imagine what radical and transformative pedagogy, theatre-making and scholarship might look like. The contributors both invoke and invert the paradigm of Global Shakespeare, building on the vital contributions of this scholarly field over the past few decades but also suggesting ways in which it cannot quite accommodate the various ’global Shakespeares’ presented in these pages.

A focus on social justice, and on the many forms of social injustice that demand our attention, leads to a consideration of the North/South constructions that have tended to shape Global Shakespeare conceptually, in the same way the material histories of ’North’ and ’South’ have shaped global injustice as we recognise it today. Such a focus invites us to consider the creative ways in which Shakespeare’s imagination has been taken up by theatre-makers and scholars alike, and marshalled in pursuit of a more just world.

Chris Thurman is the Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at Wits University, South Africa. He is the editor of Shakespeare in Southern Africa, president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and founder of Shakespeare ZA. He edited South African Essays on ’Universal’ Shakespeare (2014).

Sandra Young is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her publications include Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation (The Arden Shakespeare, 2019) and The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (2015).