Shylock in the Ḥaḍramawt?: Adaptations of Shakespeare on the Yemeni Stage (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare, ed. Alexa Alice Joubin, 2024
This chapter consists of Alexa Alice Joubin's interview of a scholar and educator who has practiced global Shakespeare around the globe. Katherine Hennessey has had the unique experiences and privilege of teaching Shakespeare in Yemen, Kuwait, China, and elsewhere. She has lived and worked in eight very different countries over the past fifteen years. From 2009 to 2014, she lived in Sana’a in Yemen and co-translated A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Subhi Al-Zuraiqi into Yemeni Arabic. From 2017 to early 2022 she served on the faculty of the American University of Kuwait. She is currently an Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Global Literature at Wenzhou-Kean University in China. Her global experiences and pedagogies will prove invaluable to readers. :::: ISBN: 9781350410817
Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance
Since Najib al-Haddad and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s first Arabic versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet at the end of the 19th century, the reception of Shakespeare in the Arab world has gone through a process of adaptation, Arabization, and translation proper. We consider the process of Arabization / domestication of Shakespeare’s plays since Najib al-Haddad’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s adaptation of Hamlet, to the achievements of Khalīl Mutran and Muhammad Hamdi. We underline, as particular examples of Shakespeare’s appropriation, the literary response of Ali Ahmed Bakathir, Muhammad al-Maghut and Mamduh Udwan, with a particular stress on Khazal al-Majidi and his adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. All these writers reposition Shakespeare’s plays in an entirely different cultural space.
Shakespeare in Arabic Translations and Adaptations: The Search for Dramatic Canon
The present paper is an attempt to highlight the corpus of Shakespeare in Arabic translations and adaptations. More recently, Hamlet and Richard III, for instance, have been re-cast, re-set and recreated in the Arab world in numerous adaptations and appropriations; attesting to the multiplicity rather than the uniqueness of a Shakespearean text. Although Hamlet and Richard III seem to do nothing with colonial/postcolonial discourse, the paper aims at finding out the curiosities behind and the growing interest in translating and appropriating such texts. Seemingly, by invoking Shakespeare, Arabs do not necessarily respond to a former colonizer or intend to be part of the postcolonial model of writing-back; rather they use Shakespeare as a text- a case to be examined whether such use is in pursuit of canon or it signals the inequality between languages. Beyond a binary relationship between the original texts and the rewritings, the paper also problematizes and questions the validity of appropriating Shakespeare and using his works as a vehicle to muse in contemporary issues of the Arab world.
Arab Shakespeares at the World Shakespeare Congress
Shakespeare Survey 71, 2018
This chapter surveys contemporary Shakespearean performances across the Arab world. It highlights the diversity of the region as a whole, and the variety of its translators', authors', and theater practitioners' approaches to Shakespearean texts and references. To illustrate this range of adaptive and performative strategies, the chapter examines in detail three recent productions inspired by Shakespeare's plays: Richard II by the Ashtar Theater Company of Ramallah (Palestine), The Dark Night by Omani playwright and actor Ahmad al-Izki, and British-Kuwaiti playwright and director Sulayman Al Bassam's The Speaker's Progress.
Interpreting Othello in the Arabian Gulf: Shakespeare in a Time of Blackface Controversies
Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance
This article opens with some brief observations on the phenomenon of Arab blackface—that is, of Arab actors “blacking up” to impersonate black Arab or African characters—from classic cinematic portrayals of the warrior-poet Antara Ibn Shaddad to more recent deployments of blackface in the Arab entertainment industry. It then explores the complex nexus of race, gender, citizenship and social status in the Arabian Gulf as context for a critical reflection on the author’s experience of reading and discussing Othello with students at the American University of Kuwait—discussions which took place in the fall of 2019, in the midst of a wave of controversies sparked by instances of Arab blackface on television and in social media.
"Arab Shakespeares - Ten Years Later" Critical Survey Special issue guest editors' introduction
When the first Critical Survey special issue on Arab Shakespeares (CS 19:3, Winter 2007) came out nearly a decade ago, the topic was a curiosity. There existed no up-to-date monograph in English on Arab theatre, let alone on Arab Shakespeare. Few Arabic plays had been translated into English. Few British or American theatregoers had seen a play in Arabic. In the then tiny but fast-growing field of international Shakespeare appropriation studies (now ‘Global Shakespeare’) there was a great post-9/11 hunger to know more about the Arab world but also a lingering prejudice that Arab interpretations of Shakespeare would necessarily be derivative or crude, purely local in value. Nearly a decade later, this special issue offers a variety of perspectives on the history and role of Arab Shakespeare translation, production, adaptation, and criticism. With two essays and an interview focused on the twentieth century, we have avoided an exclusive and ahistorical focus on the present. We have also striven to strike a balance between internationally and locally focused Arab/ic Shakespeare appropriations, and between Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian theatre, our contributors examine everything from an Omani performance in Qatar and an Upper Egyptian television series to the origin of the sonnets and an English-language novel about the Lebanese civil war. They address materials produced in several languages: literary Arabic (fuṣḥā), Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘ammiyya), Moroccan colloquial Arabic (darija), Swedish, French, and English. They include veteran scholars, directors, and translators as well as emerging scholars from diverse disciplinary and geographic locations, a testament to the vibrancy of this field.
2018
Seeff’s final case study is Shakespeare in Mzansi, a made-for-television miniseries, commissioned by the government-funded South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in 2006. These adaptations of Shakespeare’s texts, using black actors, several of the nine official vernacular languages, and local settings, facilitate an Africanization of the early modern texts for ideological purposes. A multilingual ethos pervades this series, as individual programs—two of Macbeth, one of King Lear, and one of Romeo and Juliet—seamlessly employ several vernacular languages within a single appropriation, code-switching among them to produce identity through language. These programs, for their moment, appropriate the plays to redress linguistic persecution and to reclaim diversity.
Acculturation in Performing Shakespeare on Saudi Stage
English Language and Literature Studies, 2019
Shakespeare is among those theatrical icons highly celebrated in the Arab world. The aim in this paper is to investigate acculturation strategies commenced by theatre amateurs in performing Shakespeare’s plays in Saudi Arabia. Major to the acculturation process is Hakim’s argument to eradicate Arabic versions from supernatural elements rejected in the Islamic Arabic culture. Among references quoted in this study are John W. Berry’s acculturation steps and Robert Barton’s three I’s of investigation, inference and invention. This study follows the descriptive analytical method and relies on interviews and focus groups to trace those strategies endeavored in local adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Hamlet. Figures demonstrate not only the different sectors in Saudi amateur theatre, but also their strategies in acculturation for the aim of staging to different audiences. One of the most important figures is the module recommended in the conclusion to facilitate the tasks of directors in performing Shakespeare and Classics to non-English audiences.