What Is a “Weyward” Macbeth?

Thompson, Ayanna

doi:10.1007/978-0-230-10216-3_1

Cited by 6 publications

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“…I follow the lead of Ruben Espinosa in this endeavor by “employ[ing] a cross‐historical approach that engages contemporary understandings of ethnic, racial, and cultural politics” while being attuned to the ways in which ideas about the premodern past have shaped or stifled those understandings (Espinosa, 2016, p. 61). As the contributors to Ayanna Thompson and Scott L. Newstok's 2010 collection Weyward Macbeth have amply demonstrated, “ Macbeth may not fit neatly into the category of a ‘race’ play,” but “like a specter is it nevertheless haunted by, and haunts, the rhetoric and performances of race” (Thompson, 2010b, p. 5). Examining a wide range of twenty‐first century “narco” Macbeth s through multitemporal and multimedia perspectives reveals both a pattern and a recursive loop wherein “the Scottish play” is repeatedly used to reactivate the wounds of colonial conquest, to perpetuate ideologies about racial, ethnic, and cultural supremacy, and to justify further inequality and imperial intervention.…”

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Seeing Shakespeare: Narco narratives and neocolonial appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands

Santos

2022

Literature Compass

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This essay examines the racializing logics and consequences of drawing analogies between the works of William Shakespeare and the devastatingly violent realities of the drug trade in the Americas. The particular prominence of Macbeth in the wide range of Shakespearean invocations and appropriations in contemporary US narratives about narcotrafficking cannot be attributed simply to the fact that it is a tale of bloody ambition. Rather, the repeated mapping of a play that comes to its conclusion with an English military invasion of its “barbarous” Scottish neighbors onto the US–Mexico Borderlands speaks to much deeper histories of colonial conquest and to neocolonial interventionist policies and actions of the present. The essay concludes by turning to two recent instances in which theater artists have translated and significantly revised Macbeth in order to reframe dominant narratives about narcotrafficking, racial supremacy, and the border. These productions demonstrate the disruptive and transformative potential of Shakespearean appropriations that resist neocolonial power structures and ideologies.

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confidence: 99%

Seeing Shakespeare: Narco narratives and neocolonial appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands

Santos

2022

Literature Compass

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Is It Possible to Read Shakespeare through Critical White Studies?

Little¹

2021

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race

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Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism

Yim

2019

J. Am. Stud.

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As scholarly work on race in Shakespeare studies continues to develop, this article examines how important insights from critical Indigenous studies can help us to refine and enhance this work to more fully see historical moments at which Shakespeare's works have been appropriated in response to the oppression of settler colonialism. Taking an 1893 political cartoon from a New York newspaper as a representation of settler violence against Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i, this essay traces the uses of Banquo's ghost in Hawaiian newspapers as a figure that haunts the racializing elimination of Native rule.

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What Is a “Weyward” Macbeth?

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Seeing Shakespeare: Narco narratives and neocolonial appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands

Seeing Shakespeare: Narco narratives and neocolonial appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands

Is It Possible to Read Shakespeare through Critical White Studies?

Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism

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