‘Downright unsaxogrammatical’? — Do Postcolonial Adaptations Contest, or Reinforce Shakespeare’s Canonical Status?

Abstract

Appropriation, in certain areas of traditional Shakespeare scholarship, is a synonym for ‘interrogating, torturing, mutilating’, as Ivo Kamps describes,¹ and according to Brian Vickers, ‘rival groups’ of Shakespeare scholars and other academics have subordinated the texts themselves in favour of the ‘self-advancement of the particular group’,² a practice which he holds to be ‘iconoclastic’ without any positive connotations, ‘adversarial’, purposely ‘negative, destructive’, even ‘combative’.³ For postcolonial studies, appropriation means something very different: it refers to a positive process of transformation. In Bill Ashcroft’s terms, appropriation is a creative, empowering act whereby ‘colonized societies have taken dominant discourses, transformed them and used them in the service of their own self-empowerment’ in order to transform ‘the very nature of the cultural power that has dominated them’.⁴ So when the postcolonial writer adapts or translates the Shakespeare text with a view to appropriate that text, the desire to write back invokes re-vision, not terrorism.