ABSTRACT
In an age of “nationalist cosmopolitanisms,” some Shakespeare adapters from Europe and India, as well as other writers, registered their sense of anxiety regarding the loss of cultural autonomy by featuring a protagonist caught between the forces of tradition and modernity. Any Shakespeare adaptation, therefore, needs to be examined synchronically across national and cultural boundaries, in addition to studying it diachronically with other adaptations over time of the same play. As a corollary, I discuss why mimicry in Bhabha’s sense characterises the urban cultures of several countries after independence, a phenomenon I call post-colonial mimicry. Following a re-examination of the drawbacks of some of the fundamental assumptions of postcolonial theory and cultural studies, this chapter argues for adaptation theory as a new means for analysing cross-cultural exchanges, and urges scholars with diverse areas of expertise to come together, using this methodological framework, in order to make available the histories of Shakespeare reception in various non-Anglophone cultures.
