Re-Imagining Cleopatra/Postcolonial Shakespeare

**NB this seminar has been postponed from 18th October to 6th December 2019**

Yasmin Arshad: ‘Re-imagining Cleopatra: Poetry, Portraiture and Power’

Cleopatra VII is one of the world’s most contested and politically-charged female figures. The image that dominates popular culture now derives mainly from Shakespeare and is that of the sultry siren of the East. Although it is Shakespeare’s Cleopatra who permeates our consciousness today, this is often in a debased form, lacking in the nuance with which this most controversial of history’s queens was invested since she captured the literary Renaissance imagination. Sixteenth-century writers were already avidly interested in Cleopatra, well before Shakespeare wrote his play, and produced widely divergent and even contradictory depictions of her. Focusing on the neo-Senecan dramas of Mary Sidney and Samuel Daniel, and a remarkable portrait of a young Jacobean woman, possibly Anne Clifford in the guise of Cleopatra, this talk provides evidence to suggest that the period was much readier to view the Egyptian queen as a positive emblematic figure than has been previously recognized. In particular, it highlights the idea of Cleopatra as a figure of female complaint, and examines the readiness of some women of the period to co-opt the image of Cleopatra for political purposes. These fresh explorations of Mary Sidney’s and Daniel’s Cleopatras enable us to look at Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in a new light. 

Jyotsna G. Singh: ‘Re-thinking Shakespeare from a Postcolonial Perspective: Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth’

Exploring a few key features of a postcolonial perspective on Shakespeare’s works, this talk highlights the recent emergence of intercultural, cross-racial Shakespearean disseminations within criticism, performance, and film. The thrust of this scholarship highlights interactions with local knowledges and native cultures, showing how Shakespeare’s works are increasingly used to tell stories about diverse lives and experiences.  Instead of earlier colonial paradigms, scholars and critics are attending to a polyphony of voices beyond the binary of colonizer/colonized.  For example, recent postcolonial, cultural engagements with two key plays, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth, demonstrate an expansion of the Shakespearean archive into varied, non-metropolitan spaces within a range of historical moments.  Overall, in these readings, we can see how a postcolonial critical vocabulary connects contemporary and early modern cultural struggles and social change.