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Beirut conference – Shakespeare and the Orient

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CFP: SHAKESPEARE’S IMAGINED ORIENT (MAY 4-6, 2011)
Due Jan 21 2011
American University of Beirut
shakespeareandtheorient@gmail.com
The American University of Beirut is hosting a three-day conference on Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient on 4-6 May 2011. Speakers include Jonathan Burton (West Virginia University), Gerald Maclean (University of Exeter, UK), Margaret Litvin (Boston University), Daniel Vitkus (Florida State University) and Richard Wilson (Cardiff University). Shakespeare studies has recently experienced a noticeable and dramatic geographical shift. As the textual landscape of Shakespeare’s drama changes, it takes new forms and now points to new horizons, namely the East and the Orient, and more particularly the Levant. From the blasted heaths of England, Shakespeare moves to the most arid and yet fertile soils of the Levant. The aim of the conference, in this emergent field, is to reconsider Shakespeare’s diffusion from both Pre and Postcolonial Middle Eastern perspectives and to examine Shakespeare’s critical relevance to understanding religion and politics on both a local scale (in the Middle East/the Orient) and globally. Reaching across disciplinary boundaries, Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient aims to prove how the critical and artistic reception of Shakespeare in the Orient is paramount to apprehending and reinventing Shakespeare as a cultural and social bridge uniting the “East” and the “West” in the landscape of global culture. The organisers of the conference hope to offer a critical insight into Shakespeare and Early Modern political theology that would help refashion, remap broader issues that engage the status of cultural and religious identity, nation, and individuality in the landscape of global culture. With such issues in mind, we invite submissions concerning the following range of topics: – Representations of the Orient in Shakespeare’s Work, – Christian/Muslim Representation/Interaction on Shakespeare’s/the Early Modern stage, – Local/Global Shakespeare (from a Middle Eastern perspective), – Shakespeare’s women and the Orient, – Desire, Phantasm, and the Orient, – Identity and Nationhood, – Material Culture and the Imagined Orient on Shakespeare’s Stage.

Please send abstracts (300 words) or session proposals and brief CV by 21 January 2011. Notifications will be sent by 15 February 2011. On your abstract please include your name, institution, city and state or country, email address and phone number. E-mail your abstracts/session proposals as a Word file. Please note that each presentation is limited to 25 minutes (including questions). Full details can be downloaded from the conference website at http://www.aub.edu.lb/conferences/shake_orient/ Questions may be addressed to the conference chair: Prof. Francois-Xavier Gleyzon at ShakespeareandtheOrient@gmail.com
Department of English
American University of Beirut
Fisk Hall, Rm 229
PO Box 11-0236
Beirut 1107 2020 – Lebanon
The conference is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the British Council, the Anis K. Makdisi Program in Literature, the Office of the Provost, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut.

Seeking video of Arab/ic Shakespeare performances

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The Global Shakespeares web archive at MIT has gone live — with virtually no content on its Arab World section. There’s only my placeholder introduction. 
Yalla! Let’s send our archivist friends some video to include in the site.  Any leads can be sent to me or to Prof. Peter Donaldson, the site’s editor-in-chief.

Nehad Selaiha rereads my dissertation…

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Hamlet galore: Nehad Selaiha enjoys a Hamletian feast at the Creativity Centre
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/963/cu1.htm

Of all the foreign dramas translated into Arabic, including Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet has been the most influential since the 1950s. Not only has its language, particularly Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and phrases like “The time is out of joint” or “Frailty, thy name is woman”, found its way into the rhetoric of political writers and intellectuals and even in the daily speech of the educated, it has also haunted the imagination of playwrights, directors and actors, appearing in different guises to address different needs at different historical moments. Echoes of Hamlet abound in many of the best dramas produced in the 1960s, and at least three tragedies, Alfred Farag’s Sulayman Al-Halabi and Al-Zeir Salem and Salah Abdel Sabour’s The Tragedy of Al-Hallaj, modeled their heroes on the Prince of Denmark, giving them more or less the same moral/political/ existential dilemmas. While the play itself has not received many ‘textually unadulterated’ productions — the most famous and memorable being Sayed Bedeir’s at the Opera house in 1964/65, starring the late, great Karam Metawi’, and Mohamed Subhi’s 1978 one, in which he also played the title role — it has inspired a spade of stage adaptations, original plays and what can be best described as ironic, inter-textual engagements.

In her extensively researched, well informed and deeply insightful doctoral dissertation on the appropriation of Hamlet by Arab culture between 1952 and 2002 (entitled Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Adventures in Political Culture and Drama, soon to be published in book form), American scholar Margaret Litvin demonstrates that the different Arab Hamlet-appropriations since the 1952 Egyptian revolution ‘fall into 4 main phases’ that ‘have corresponded to the prevailing political moods in the region’. The first phase (1952-64) was one of ‘euphoric pride after the 1952 revolution’, and in it ‘Arab dramatists’ preoccupations with Hamlet were focused on [achieving literary and theatrical] international standards’. The second phase (1964-67) was one of ‘soul-searching and impatience for progress’ and ‘Hamlet’s incorporation into Arab political drama’ then took the form of what Litvin calls (in the manuscript of her thesis, which she has graciously sent me, and from which all the above quotations and the ones that follow are taken): a ‘”Hamletization” of the Arab Muslim political hero’. ‘Such Hamletization,’ she goes on to say, ‘was an easy way for Arab playwrights to emulate (and borrow) Hamlet’s complexity of characterization and to obtain the moral and political standing it conferred. Thus the critical demand for deep, complex, yet politically topical characters encouraged serious dramatists to weave strands of Hamlet in their heroes — in turn linking the character of Hamlet with the theme of earthly justice in the audience’s imagination’ (Litvin, pp, 12, 13. 82).

Brooklyn June 11

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Brooklyn June 11 was a lot of fun. The audience was pretty big, and full of people who asked smart questions and seemed really to like the show. So did NYT’s Ben Brantley. (And wrote a really perceptive review, I thought.)

Here is also my backgrounder, written in a big hurry at the Asia Society’s request. Most of this will be news to no one who reads this blog. Except maybe this nugget:

In 1935, Egypt’s future president Gamal Abdel Nasser starred in a production of
Julius Caesar put on at his Cairo high school. He played Caesar as a liberating
nationalist hero who defeated Great Britain.

It’s true! Check Georges Vaucher or Joel Gordon or any good Nasser biography.

My review of CIFET

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Just out in the new PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/performing_arts_journal/v031/31.2.litvin.html

War Stories, Language Games, and Struggle for Recognition
Located on the Nile Corniche, the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel reveals only a picture-window slice of Cairo. Guests of this year’s Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre (CIFET) entered a security fortress: concrete barriers, bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and handbag searches. Inside, the cappuccinos were perfect; the sunset, through a double filter of pollution and tinted glass, looked magical. Some visitors wondered if this wasn’t too sumptuous a place for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to lodge the foreign guests it had invited for the festival’s accompanying three-day seminar on “Challenges Facing the Independent Theatre and Threats to Its Survival.” Having lived for a year (2001-2002) as a student in a rooftop flat in downtown Cairo, listening to a constant din of mosque loudspeakers and taxi horns, I appreciated the change of scene that came with being an invited seminar…

More in
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – Volume 31, Number 2, May 2009 (PAJ 92), pp. 65-71
Volume 31, Number 2, May 2009 (PAJ 92) The MIT Press. 20th Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre , Cairo, Egypt, October 10-20, 2008.

My lecture on Arab Hamlets

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Check it out – I’m famous! Cornell recorded an invited lecture I gave there last spring on post-1975 Arab Hamlets. The talk is titled “Shall We Be or Not Be: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Anxieties of Arab Nationalism.” Video is here: http://www.cornell.edu/video/details.cfm?vidID=222&display=preferences
Audio is here: http://www.cornell.edu/mediavolume/events/2008/20080228_litvinMargaret.mp3
That’s Shawkat Toorawa (thanks, Shawkat!) giving the very gracious introduction.

Villain Steals the Show (Claudius article)

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The current Journal of Arabic Literature has my piece on versions of Claudius in post-1975 Arab appropriations of Hamlet. Basically I argue that he turns into an invincible monster, a political Leviathan and sexual Minotaur who takes up the whole space of the play, leaving no space for real politics. I’m grateful to the anon. reviewer who made me figure out what I mean by “politics”… this pushed me to realize that you can in fact have power without politics, i.e., without members of a society having an opportunity to exercise their political natures in the Aristotelian sense. But what would political theatre or political agency mean in a context like that?
Anyway, here’s the link:
When the Villain Steals the Show: The Character of Claudius in Post-1975 Arab(ic) Hamlet Adaptations JAL 38:2, 196-219.

My review of Al-Bassam’s Richard

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Almost a year later (who knows how the production has evolved by now?) my review of Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is out in the Winter ’07 Shakespeare Bulletin. Online through Project MUSE here: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v025/25.4litvin.html

And here are the nut grafs:

Included in the Complete Works Festival, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy was billed as a “response” to the main RSC production. It was an inspired commission. The Kuwaiti-British Al-Bassam oversaw a new Arabic translation of Shakespeare’s text and assembled a gifted pan-Arab cast. He
worked with costume designer Abdulla Al Awadi to reproduce (and parody) a variety of regional fashions, dressing Queen Elizabeth (Carole Abboud) in Qatar-esque “sophisticated hijab” and punctuating Lady Anne (Nadine Joma’a) with a pink handbag in the shape of a poodle. He recruited Kuwaiti musicians to perform a powerful score that drew on a range of Gulf Arab musical styles, offset with eerie post-modern compositions by Lewis Gibson. And, as he had done in his earlier Shakespeare adaptation, The Al-Hamlet Summit (staged in English in 2002 and in Arabic since 2004), Al-Bassam sought out contemporary Arab and Muslim
correlatives for Shakespeare’s treatment of rhetoric, religion, family, and politics.

However, Al-Bassam’s take on Richard III went a step deeper than allegory. Tickets were originally sold under the title “Baghdad Richard,” but Al-Bassam wisely decided against producing an adaptation centered on Saddam Hussein. Instead Richard III: An Arab Tragedy used Shakespeare’s play to orient Western viewers to some traits of Gulf Arab culture and politics. It also commented (pessimistically, I thought) on the chances that such an orientation could somehow make sense of the violence and suffering in the region. In fact, by showing how the very tokens of cultural exchange (traditional costumes, music, prayers, food rituals, rhetorical tropes, etc.) were cynically theatricalized and exploited by those in power, the production undercut its own ethnographic lessons even as it imparted them.

Journal issue devoted to Arab Shakespeare

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The current issue of Critical Survey brings together seven articles on Arab/ic adaptations, translations, and rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays. Beginning of my editorial is reprinted below (the PDF is here); you can see the whole issue (but your library needs to subscribe to Berghann Journals) here. Hurray! Many thanks to Prof. Graham Holderness for making this possible.

To my knowledge, this is the first essay collection in any language to be devoted to Arab appropriations of Shakespeare. Studies of international Shakespeare appropriation have mushroomed over the past 15 to 20 years. Excitement began to build in the 1990s, as several lines of academic inquiry converged. Translation theorists found in Shakespeare’s plays a convenient (because widely known and prestigious) test case. Scholars in performance studies, having noted how sharply local context could influence a play’s staging and interpretation, saw a need to account for ‘intercultural’ performances of Shakespeare in various languages and locales. Marxist scholars became interested in the fetishization of Shakespeare as a British cultural icon
which, in turn, was used to confer cultural legitimacy on the project of capitalist empire-building. Scholars of postcolonial drama and literature explored how the periphery responded. The “new Europe” provided another compelling set of examples. All this scholarship has developed quickly and with a great sense of urgency. Shakespeareans in many countries have contributed. By now there is a rich bibliography on Shakespeare appropriation in India, China, Japan, South Africa, Israel, and many countries in Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe.
Until recently, scholars of Arabic literature and drama were mainly passive participants in this growing Shakespeare conversation. The Arab world went unnoticed in the numerous edited volumes on international Shakespeare reception and appropriation. Though often aware of the major congresses on the subject, Arab scholars were rarely represented there. The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online, which catalogues materials in 118 languages, has had only
one active Arabic-speaking contributor in the past decade. Interesting studies of Shakespeare reception written in Arabic have not been translated. In English, a handful of articles and dissertations has represented the field. When scholars in Europe and the United States have occasionally mentioned ‘Arab Shakespeare’ to their colleagues, they have presented it almost as a novelty. Sometimes they have not hesitated to draw easy laughs by invoking the old legend
or joke that Shakespeare was really a crypto-Arab, ‘Shaykh Zubayr’.
However, this situation is changing quickly. In 2006 and 2007 the World Shakespeare Congress and the Royal Shakespeare Company, respectively, welcomed contributions by Arab playwrights. Shakespeareans and scholars of Arab drama and literature are getting better at talking to each other. (I should note that Graham Holderness has personally done much to help this trend with his involvement and encouragement over the past two years.) And as the essays in this issue will attest, Shakespeareans and Arabists alike are taking a variety of approaches to the question of what Arab readers, translators, rewriters, producers, directors, critics, and audiences do with Shakespeare.

Articles by Mark Bayer, Sameh F. Hanna, Khalid Amine, Rafik Darragi, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, Holderness, and me.