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Allen D. Breck Award Winner: The Presence Of The Past: Shakespeare In South Africa, Natasha Distiller

Quidditas

In what ways has Shakespeare—as a collection of texts, as cultural capital, as a tool of a colonial education system as powerful as the bible and the gun—manifest in South African culture? Today I will sketch the presence of the past in a way which aims to draw out the South African in Shakespeare as much as the Shakespearean in South Africa. I do this following the post-colonial call to redress the imbalance of knowledges between the West and the Rest, and in order to break a simplistic cultural binary which posits “African,” colonized culture on one side and “European,” …