Race, Post-Race, Shakespeare, and South Africa

In a newly democratic South Africa, the South African Broadcasting Company commissioned updated re-tellings of Shakespeares plays using local settings, vernacular languages, and black actors. They sought local programming that could be projected into a global entertainment market. These stories would help heal a nation's trauma and provide a broader representation of black South African scriptwriters, directors, and actors speaking African vernacular. I focus largely on two re-versionings of Macbeth (a King Lear and a Romeo and Juliet were also produced) to argue that these made-for-television appropriations are reclamation projects. Each employs different filmic and rhetorical strategies to represent a utopian post-racial world using the once imperial icon, Shakespeare, as a point of access to global audiences. Thoroughly exploiting Shakespeare's cultural capital, these programs show us that "African" indigeneity and identity are shifting and fluid, and infused with desire; that discourse(s) can be democratized but that hierarchies persist; and that strategies of identity formation remain hostage to apartheid's continuing afterlife. These Africanized re-versionings surrogate Shakespeare's text to dramatize and experiment with linguistic, national, and gender identities.