How do we analyze diverse and polyphonic performances around the world with an eye towards equity and social justice? This lecture outlines new methodologies for the study of Shakespeare as world literature through the notion of heterotopia—a concept, proposed by Michel Foucault, that describes worlds within worlds, or cultural spaces that are transformative because of their contradictory or trans-historical ideologies.

Drawing on Alexa Alice Joubin’s new book, Shakespeare and East Asia, this lecture examines select Sinophone, Japanese, and Korean adaptations as heterotopia. Heterotopia, as a parallel space that contains and evokes other spaces, exists in reality (such as a theatre stage) and holds up a mirror to other realities. As heterotopia, global Shakespeare performances make the place that audiences occupy both distinct from the dramatic space and connected with the other worlds contained within and alluded to by the performance.

An example of global Shakespeare as heterotopia is Yukio Ninagawa’s high-concept production of Hamlet (1998 and 2015), which turns the art of theatre-making inside out through its metatheatrical conceit. The production opens with actor-characters warming up, running their lines and touching up on their makeup. They mill around on a set that represents the backstage of a theatre where the actor-characters both prepare for and stage Hamlet. The two-story set consists of dressing rooms with privacy curtains, complete with lighted mirrors, photographs and bouquets. The lower level is a common dressing area for everyone, while the upper level is reserved for leading actor-characters’ individual dressing rooms. This backstage space is now upstage. This set doubles as rooms in Elsinore Castle once the story of Hamlet begins.

Heterotopia pushes back against the illusions of Shakespeare’s ubiquity and universal meanings by pluralizing the aesthetic and political positions across and within artistic, scholarly and pedagogical communities. Global performances of Shakespeare create worlds within worlds by combining the plays’ and audiences’ senses of place to build cultural spaces that are transformative. Heterotopia, created by the craft of world-making, anchors and enables characters’ transformative experiences and self-discovery.

About the Speaker

Alexa Alice Joubin is the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award and the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. She is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University, where she serves as founding Co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. She was appointed the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick in the UK.