Global Shakespeare

Call for Papers

Shakespeare (The Journal of the British Shakespeare Association) Announces a Special Issue on "Global Shakespeare"

Deadline: September 30, 2011

The special issue welcomes papers on Shakespeare in performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that participate in or initiate debates—theory, praxis, reception—worldwide. During his lifetime, Shakespeare’s plays were performed in Europe and subsequently taken to remote corners of the globe, including Sierra Leone, Socotra, and colonial Indonesia. Performances in England also had a global flair. European visitors such as Thomas Platter witnessed the plays on stage at the Globe (1599) and left behind diary records. Four centuries on, there has been a sea change. In theatre, Shakespeare has been recruited, exemplified, resisted, and debated in post/colonial encounters, in the international avant-garde led by Ariane Mnouchkine, Ninagawa Yukio, Peter Brook, Tadashi Suzuki, and others, and in the circuits of global politics and tourism in late capitalist societies.

As artists reconstruct notions of tradition, critics are no longer confined by the question of narrowly defined cultural authenticity. However, what are the new paradigms that can help us avoid replicating the old author-centered textuality in performance criticism? What critical resources might we bring to the task of interpreting the behaviors and signs in performance? What is the role of local and global spectators? More importantly, what is the task of criticism as it deals with the transformations of Shakespeare and various performance idioms?

Articles in this issue will take stock of the worldwide histories of performance and criticism to uncover any blind spots in current methodologies to study the theoretical and artistic implications of Shakespeare and the cultures of diaspora, Anglophone countries, Europe, Russia, Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

In addition, this issue will also feature a section devoted to recent adaptations in English and other languages, including those staged and screened during the 2011 SAA in Bellevue: The Bond (dir. Lü Boshen), a Chinese opera adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, and The Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu), a Tibetan film inspired by Hamlet.

We invite two types of submissions --

• Standard length journal article: criticism
• Short performance reviews

Please follow the Journal's Instructions for Authors (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1745-0918&linktype=44)

Queries or submissions--WORD (.doc) file, double-spaced, 12-point font; no .docx files please--to be emailed to Alex Huang at acyhuang05@gmail.com