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Page 10 Africanist reading of The Tempest. Acts of appropriation, as they put the rhetoric of identification into the service of the personal, become what Kenneth Burke would call a “representative anecdote,” a stylized answer to the questions they pose (1973:1). Appropriations, then, make a strong statement in a bold way. To this extent, Shakespearean appropriation often comes close to that least valued form of literary appreciation, character criticism (Desmet 1992). Yet acts of appropriation are also responsive, in the sense intended by Bakhtin (1990) when he calls the ethical dimension among dialogic texts “answerability,” so that every “response” of one text to another also renders that discourse “responsible.” On the other hand, as Lisa S.Starks shows when she subjects Kenneth Branagh and his version of Hamlet to the hermeneutics of suspicion, the most resolutely a-theoretical statements are subject to the most interesting theoretical readings. Starks’s finely nuanced account of the literary genealogy that links the filmed Hamlets of Kenneth Branagh, Franco Zeffirelli, and Laurence Olivier points to the complex relation between theory and practice in Shakespearean appropriation. Because Branagh’s film records his resistance to Olivier’s placement of Shakespeare’s play within psychoanalytic discourse, Branagh’s ironically becomes the most repressed of the filmed Hamlets. Although performance and film criticism have emerged as scholarly fields in their own right, it is important to recognize performance as a form of appropriation. Chatterjee and Singh point to the fact that identity is always derived, but also performed (Butler 1990). In the case of the Bengali actor Addy, the formulation of a “hybrid’’ identity offered, at least momentarily, a “way out” of cultural fantasies about the Moor and his relation to the rhetoric of empire. To the extent that appropriation is a performance of identity, it offers possibilities for cracking the codes of ideology and provides glimpses of realities that as yet have no name. III Shakespeare’s futureGary Taylor’s “Afterword” to Shakespeare and Appropriation predicts the demise of big-time Shakespeare. Taylor does not think that the diminution of Shakespeare’s cultural influence is a bad thing: it makes room for other writers, other forms of entertainment, other takes on life. But “Shakespeare” and “Appropriation,” at least as a small-time activity, remain closely linked by more than the weak conjunction “and” in this book’s title. |
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