ABSTRACT
Scholarship in the last fifteen years or so has analysed the global spread of English studies and its most popular export, William Shakespeare, as a measure of the imperial will to power rather than as a marker of the universal humanism of English high culture. Or rather, humanism itself, with its claim to speak fluently across cultural and temporal divides, has been shown to be the ideological glove for racism and other ugly realities of colonialist regimes. Said’s Orientalism inspired such studies of the work of European cultural products in their colonies, but somewhat paradoxically, these studies may have also ensured a new lease of life for such cultural products. In the process of being demystified and re-examined, Western cultural icons have continued to occupy the attention of literary critics both within and outside the Anglo-American academy, even (or especially) those who are critical of the Eurocentric parameters of their discipline. Whose interests does it serve for academics to reinterpret, re-teach, re-circulate these texts, and to show that they mean, or can be made to signify, something entirely different from their received meanings? Do such rewritings and appropriations lock us forever into the dominance of European culture and disable the project of creating truly postcolonial cultures?
