New Words: Language and Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Global South

TY - CHAP

T1 - New Words

T2 - Language and Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Global South

AU - Refskou, Anne Sophie

AU - Khair, Tabish

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - This chapter focuses on iterations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in literary cultures across the “global South”. It analyses ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and translators from a broad geographical and cultural range—India, Bangladesh, the Caribbean and Brazil—have engaged directly and indirectly with the Sonnets. Drawing on postcolonial criticism and on more recent critical conceptualizations of the global South, the chapter identifies themes and literary strategies shared by writers and translators, whose engagement with the Sonnets is marked by different kinds of postcolonial linguistic and literary heritage. Simultaneously, the chapter argues that foregrounding the global afterlives of the Sonnets specifically (as opposed to the plays) requires critical engagement with a global poetics of the Shakespearean text and its language; a critical engagement which is sometimes missing in Global Shakespeare studies’ tendency to focus on the ways in which global theatre, cinema and popular culture reinvent and reinvigorate Shakespeare in ways that need not include his words. Although decentring the Shakespearean text has been a liberating move for Global Shakespeare, the chapter argues that it is important to continue the critical negotiation of “Shakespeare’s Language” in a global context and particularly to do so from the perspective of the global South.

AB - This chapter focuses on iterations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in literary cultures across the “global South”. It analyses ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and translators from a broad geographical and cultural range—India, Bangladesh, the Caribbean and Brazil—have engaged directly and indirectly with the Sonnets. Drawing on postcolonial criticism and on more recent critical conceptualizations of the global South, the chapter identifies themes and literary strategies shared by writers and translators, whose engagement with the Sonnets is marked by different kinds of postcolonial linguistic and literary heritage. Simultaneously, the chapter argues that foregrounding the global afterlives of the Sonnets specifically (as opposed to the plays) requires critical engagement with a global poetics of the Shakespearean text and its language; a critical engagement which is sometimes missing in Global Shakespeare studies’ tendency to focus on the ways in which global theatre, cinema and popular culture reinvent and reinvigorate Shakespeare in ways that need not include his words. Although decentring the Shakespearean text has been a liberating move for Global Shakespeare, the chapter argues that it is important to continue the critical negotiation of “Shakespeare’s Language” in a global context and particularly to do so from the perspective of the global South.

KW - Global Shakespeare

KW - Global South

KW - Language

KW - Postcolonialism

KW - Textuality

KW - Translation

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85201309705&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-09472-9_8

DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-09472-9_8

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-3-031-09471-2

SN - 978-3-031-09474-3

SP - 127

EP - 144

BT - Shakespeare's Global Sonnets

A2 - Kingsley-Smith, Jane

A2 - Ramone, William

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

CY - Cham

ER -