Description
Book SynopsisThis study finds a significant number of contemporary writers and artists who quote our most quotable author for the purpose of reconsidering and reformulating the twin themes of Shakespeare and race. The book examines Shakespeare quotation as a means of revision in the work of Nadine Gordimer, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Leon Forrest, Ishmael Reed, Caryl Phillips, Djanet Sears, Fred Wilson, and J. M. Coetzee. In addition, a pivotal chapter discusses Paul Robeson as an earlier figure whose performance of Othello poses the problem of race in Shakespeare and suggests the need for reinterpretation.
Trade Review'Erickson's Citing Shakespeare examines the complex, sometimes ambivalent and even combustive relationship between artists of the African Diaspora and Shakespeare's language, texts and image. From Rita Dove's poetry to Ishmael Reed's novels to the visual art of Fred Wilson, we see that Shakespearean citation is one of several techniques used by these virtuosos to defamiliarize, defy reader expectation, create culture, reverse the flows of power, and just plain play. Erickson's expanded framework for citation allows for the multiple languages that these artists use to 'speak' to Shakespeare, including word, character, history, bodies, and the light, shadow, gloss and heft of the visual image. Citing Shakespeare is a blueprint for a more expansive and inclusive Shakespeare Studies, one which shows serious political and scholarly commitment to interrogations of race, gender and nationhood, which engages learnedly the insights of multiple disciplines and traditions, and which asks difficult questions about Shakespeare's continuing function as a site of cultural power.' - Francesca Royster, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, DePaul University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Allusion as Revision Multicultural Legacies Allusive Affinities Othello and/or Venice Worlds Elsewhere Acknowledgements Index
