Artists in different places often hold contrasting views on the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays and on Shakespeare’s stature in modern culture. What they do have in common is their effort to plant new ideas along well-trodden paths and to blaze new trails through long-abandoned territories. To quote novelist Minae Mizumura, if we walk “through the doors” of other cultural spaces more often, we may, one day, reach “unpathed waters and undreamed shores.”
In this talk, Alexa Alice Joubin examined cultural encounters with Shakespeare’s plays as heterotopia, a place of stories and a portal to other places. In particular, theatre and film are key players in creating embodied snippets of knowable worlds, as adaptations and performances open up national cultures to other views. Artists and audiences project their beliefs onto dramatic works to create hybrid worlds across cultures and history. Joubin argued that since the fictional space created by performance juxtaposes multiple worlds, this heterotopic space—a microcosm of different temporalities and worlds—has multiple layers of cultural meanings.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the year-long series, Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Images George Rex
