ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a modern performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Sinhala by the Shakespeare Center, a Sri Lankan theater company, analyzing their representations of the (dis)abled body through the character of the epileptic ruler. The chapter reads Caesar’s body as a palimpsest which is written and overwritten by cultural interpretations of disablement in Sri Lanka, studying performance as a way of making meaning of the cultural norms of “normality” and “abnormality.” Considering how bringing a nonnormative body onto the stage problematizes the hegemonic assumptions of performing a character on stage, the chapter argues that Julius Caesar’s body becomes a narrative prosthesis that straddles the boundaries between normal and abnormal, accepted and rejected, and performative and nonperformative bodies. Thus, this chapter discusses the politics of performing a disabled character in a Sri Lanka context, interpreting it as a liberatory process that forces us to collide with the untapped potentials of such (ab)normal bodies.
