Professor Sandra Young will present her lecture, Exploring the literary imagination in times of reckoning: What might Shakespeare have to do with Social Justice today? at the LT1 Auditorium, Neville Alexander Building, School of Education on lower campus on Wednesday, 16 October at 17:30 SAST.

How do works of the imagination help us to reckon with difficult histories, in a world that continues to feel the impact of centuries of unjust social structures? This is the challenge Saidiya Hartman confronts when, writing about the lives of the enslaved, she asks: “What are the stories one tells in dark times?” The question pertains to the writing of history, as well as creative practice, and has challenging implications for literary studies, which some regard as an elitist pursuit. But the discipline is well placed to analyse how cultural practices can secure the interests of the powerful, or challenge them. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that gives pointed attention to slavery and colonisation, offers a rewarding case study, showing theatre practice as a context for reckoning with injustice. Given the play’s wildly different interpretations historically, archival research tells a fascinating story: before abolition, Shakespeare’s version was almost never performed. It was replaced with a series of adaptations that shifted the emphasis so significantly that enslaved characters were not treated as humans whose plight deserves attention. But later independence movements wrought radical changes, and contemporary artists continue to reimagine the play to address the concerns of a new generation.

Sandra Young is Professor of English Literary Studies. Her scholarship pursues questions of social justice in works both imaginative and historical. Her most recent book, Shakespeare in the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation, examines how theatre practitioners reimagine Shakespeare’s works to tell new stories of dispossession, struggle and survival. Her first book, The Early Modern Global South in Print, traces the emergence of a racialised ‘South’ in early modern maps, geographies, and natural histories. Her current book project began while a Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. A performance history of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the study reflects on the spectre of slavery within public culture, from 1660 until today. Her research is also concerned with contemporary cultures of memory and activism, as explored in her book project, ‘An Intimate Archive: The Work of Public Remembrance in the Wake of Apartheid’ and a forthcoming co-edited special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Post-Colonialism on ‘Feminism/Memory/Activism: Local Movements, Transnational Solidarities’.