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
Year of publication: 2017
Volume: 21
Pages: 73-86
Type: Article
More publications in: Interferénces Litteraires/Litéraire Interferenties
Abstract
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.