Moderator: Selena Couture
Location: Zoom Room B
Supernaturalism and Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century theatre in Western India
In nineteenth-century colonial Western India, the reformist sphere was interested in foregrounding ‘rationality’ as the exalted faculty to battle the existing superstitious/supernatural elements in society. As a result, the reformist theatre prohibited supernatural elements on stage. At the same time, Shakespeare was imposed as a colonial cultural symbol of the superiority of the West. Adapting Shakespeare made the reformers awkward since his plays consisted profoundly of supernatural elements. This paper is interested in examining the strategies the reformers employed in the adaptations of Shakespeare to skirt supernaturalism.
To that end, the chapter is structured as follows: first, I provide a general idea of how the reformers cast theatre as ‘rational entertainment’ where supernatural elements were prohibited and were a symptom of an immoral mindset. Then, after reviewing scholarship on Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations in the context of the supernatural in Western India, I analyze Gujarati adaptations of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Macbeth to show how reformist playwrights dealt with the supernatural aesthetic in their adaptations of these plays, showing the entanglement of the supernatural aesthetics with women’s reform.
Abhimanyu Acharya, The University of Western Ontario, Year: Ph.D. 5th Year
Bio: Abhimanyu Acharya is a multilingual writer and translator currently undertaking his doctoral studies on theatre in colonial India at the University of Western Ontario. His plays have been performed at the Mississauga Fringe Festival and London Fringe Festival. He has been published in creative and academic journals such as Modern Drama, Hakara, Out of Print, and Feminist Studies.
Shakespeare in Guantánamo
Last February, US President Joe Biden pledged to close the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by the end of his term. The prison, which still holds 35 terror suspects, has stubbornly remained open for decades, a living (or perhaps undead) archive of the now abandoned US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The prison has managed to outlive the wars it was built to serve the party because of its existence as a nebulous legal entity existing at or beyond the border of various legal jurisdictions. Neither part of the contiguous United States nor administered by Cuba, the small offshore American exclave is sometimes described as a “legal black hole” (Barelli, 2002) for the way that it flouts domestic US law as well as international treaties to protect prisoners of war.
Although Guantánamo Bay is shrouded in official secrecy, it is also a highly theatrical site. In 2006, when Navy medical staff force-fed hunger strikers in prison, they opted not to use their real names. Strangely, the medics’ pseudonyms were taken from Shakespeare’s plays. Strikers were strapped into restraint chairs by Nurses Valeria (Coriolanus) and Lucentio (The Taming of the Shrew) and supervised by Senior Medical Officer Leonato (Much Ado about Nothing) as their stomachs were pumped full of meal-replacement milkshakes. In this paper, I analyze this incident as a metonym for how imperial power fastens itself to cultural knowledge.
Matt Jones, Toronto Metropolitan University
Matt Jones (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is working on a book about performance in the Deathscapes of the War on Terror.