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Page 8 personal. Kenneth Burke remains the best theorist of the rhetoric of identification that informs acts of Shakespearean appropriation like the one described by Paul Robeson. In Burke’s lexicon, identification works as a dialectic between “identification of” (a public naming of the Other’s qualities) and “identification with” (a private desire for union with the Other through mimesis or imitation) (Burke 1969:19–29, 55–59 and passim). The African American actor identifies with Othello as the victim of a racism that transcends time and place, and identifies Othello as a slave who is therefore different from himself. Robeson is not the slave in the plantation parlor, he is not the Moor, but confronted with a white actress on the public stage, he is not yet so different from either of them. Appropriation therefore becomes the arena within which the relation between Self and Other is worked out. When the Other carries with him as much cultural capital as Shakespeare does, the dynamics of identification can be highly charged, indeed. (See Desmet 1992, especially Chapter 1.) More concretely, how does Shakespearean appropriation work in practice? Several essays in this volume find Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of dialogism useful for describing a writer’s relation to Shakespeare. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981) posits that not only literary works, but language itself, is constituted from multiple, often competing voices. A novelist like Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin’s epitome of the dialogic writer, not only produces a text rich in dialogue and employs all of the dialects, verbal styles, and forms at his command, but he also attends to the rich array of meanings implicit in those utterances. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism contains within it the paradoxical intersection between conflict and community that was implicit in Rich’s reworking of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and in Burke’s rhetoric of identification. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin writes that: “The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object” (Bakhtin 1981:279). Metaphorically, at least, discourse involves dialogue with the alien. Within the tradition of Shakespearean appropriation, as both a creative and critical practice, dialogue with the alien manifests itself in a variety of literary forms and practices. The simplest, and yet most enigmatic, forms of appropriation are quotation (or citation) and simple reading. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Maya Angelou tells how, as a child, she was reduced to silence by sexual |
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