Abstract
In the panorama of Shakespeare’s reception, performance and criticism in India, King Lear has a very important role. Even though it does not deal with the discovery of the Indies or produce any iconic image of the Orient, King Lear is widely regarded as a play presenting human and family relationships in masala fashion. Amitava Roy deals extensively with the encounter between King Lear and the Asian subcontinent, underlining the ways in which the family dynamics that emerge in the play echo traditional Indian lifestyle:
The familial organization of Lear’s and Gloucester’s households (grown-up daughters and sons staying with parents and within an extended family) is obsolete now in England (and the West) whereas it’s still the norm in India. […] Let me put it to you in a rather aggressive and polemical way: how can an English girl of 18 and above studying King Lear in college or university feel the agony of Lear vis-a-vis his daughters or appreciate Cordelia’s self-sacrificing commitment to and life-giving care for her ‘four score and more’ year old father, when that student has already left home at sixteen plus and probably gets to meet her parents only once or twice annually at Christmas or similar get-togethers?1
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Notes
Amitava Roy, ‘Here to Stay: Shakespeare, the Bengali Stage and Bengali Culture’, in Colonial and Postcolonial Shakespeares, ed. by Amitava Roy, Debnarayan Bandopadhyay and Krishna Sen (Kolkata: Avantgarde, 2001), 2–28 (21–2).
K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Shakespeare: His World and His Art (New Delhi: Sterling, 1994), 445.
Homi Bhabha famously defines the hybrid place of cultural contamination as the ‘third space’. The ‘importance of hybridity’ he states, ‘is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity [to me] is the “Third Space”, which enables other positions to emerge’. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 211.
All quotations are taken from William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. by R.A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2005).
Kenneth Muir, ‘Madness in King Lear’, in Aspects of King Lear: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare Survey, ed. by Kenneth Muir and Stanley W. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23–33 (27).
Muir, 28. Interestingly, Maria Del Sapio Garbero proposes considering Tom’s figure as a Derridean pharmakon, a remedy that at first irritates Lear’s illness and finally leads to his healing; see Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005).
Margaret Whitford clarifies the figure used by the feminist writer Luce Irigaray to define mother-daughter relations: ‘In Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One, contiguity was the figure for mother and daughter: the two lips represented (among other things) the two women continually in touch with each other. But even then, Irigaray was warning that continuity in patriarchy could mean fusion and contusion of identity between women, and thus the impossibility of relations between them (since they were not separated enough for the “between” to exist, and the impossibility therefore of a maternal genealogy).’ Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, ed. by Margaret Witford (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 160–1.
Coppelia Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 33–49 (36).
For the idea of the spectres of the past haunting the present and exposing time in its being ‘out of joint’, I refer to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994).
Richard Burt, ‘Shakespeare, Glo-cali-zation, Race and the Small Screens of Popular Culture’, in Shakespeare the Movie II, ed. by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 14–36 (15–16).
The expression ‘brown Atlantic’ is used by Jigna Desai to refer to Asian migration in the UK. It modifies Paul Gilroy’s famous title The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1995) referring to the ‘Middle Passage’ of the African slaves towards America.
Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, Anglistica, 1 (1997), 22.
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 60.
Hall, 22. Dick Hebdige presents cut’n’mix as an Afro-Caribbean style of the 1980s. He writes: ‘Cut’n’mix is the music and the style of the 1980s just as rock’n’roll and rhythm’n’blues formed the bedrock for the music and the styles that have made such an impact on our culture since the 1950s.’ The story of this style is one in which ‘the journey from African drums to the Roland TR 808 drum machine, or from the Nigerian “griots” to UB40 and Ranking Ann does not run in straight lines like a sentence on a page’. See Dick Hebdige, Cut’n’mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10.
Rupa Huq, ‘Asian Kool? Bhangra and Beyond’, in Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, ed. by J. Hutnyk et al. (London: Zed, 1996), 61–80 (66).
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© 2013 Alessandra Marino
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Marino, A. (2013). Cut’n’mix King Lear: Second Generation and Asian-British Identities. In: Dente, C., Soncini, S. (eds) Shakespeare and Conflict. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311344_14
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