Professor Ayanna Thompson, director of Arizona Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, who delivered the keynote lecture, with her winning talk "Shakespeare and Unfreedom".

The innovations of contemporary theatre-makers have allowed us to glimpse the rich potential for subversion and renewal within Shakespeare’s work. These subversions were explored by scholars and theatre practitioners from around the world at a conference on ‘Shakespeare and Social Justice’ at the Fugard Theatre in May, organized by Associate Professor Sandra Young from UCT’s Department of English and Chris Thurman, Head of English at Wits, on behalf of their respective departments and the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa.

John Kani in conversation with Buhle Ngaba 

Scholars and performing arts practitioners were invited to reflect on the creative and critical impact of the many Shakespeares at play across the contemporary world and to give attention to their confrontations with injustice, in a variety of forms. Keynote speaker and President of the Shakespeare Association of America, Professor Ayanna Thompson, set the tone with an address on ‘Shakespeare and Unfreedom’. She explored histories of blackface and minstrelsy, and their subversions, in the long theatre history of Othello. Renowned theatre-makers, John Kani and Buhle Ngaba, shared stories about their experience of Shakespeare in South Africa. Delegates offered a rich array of papers probing questions of social justice and conversations about new directions in the field provided a glimpse of the road ahead. The conference affirmed that this is an exciting moment for Global Shakespeare studies and for the scholarly and creative interventions emerging from the South.