The Performance of Embodied Authorship in Shakespeare’s Nigga: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Cultural Production
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Universidad de Huelva
info
ISSN: 2031-2970
Any de publicació: 2017
Volum: 21
Pàgines: 73-86
Tipus: Article
Altres publicacions en: Interferénces Litteraires/Litéraire Interferenties
Resum
This essay undertakes the analysis of the performance of embodied authorship in Joseph Jomo Pierre’s Shakespeare’s Nigga (2013), a play that turns the canonical English writer into a stage character, William Shakespeare the slave owner, father to Othello by an enslaved African woman and to Judith by his white wife. It argues that in recontextualising Shakespeare’s body within the material practices of slavery, the black Canadian playwright frames some still urgent questions about the politics of cultural production, and specifically about the ethics of authorship from gendered and racialised perspectives.