Read and Red: Shakespeare and East Asia

Abstract:
Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. Gender roles in the play take on new meanings in translation, and familiar and unfamiliar accents expanded the characters’ racial identities.

Bio:
Alexa Alice Joubin writes about cultural globalization, Shakespeare, race, gender, and film and theatre adaptations. She is Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she is the founding co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. At MIT, she is a co-founder and a co-director of the open access Global Shakespeares digital performance archive. She is the author of Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021), co-author of Race (with Martin Orkin, Routledge, 2018), editor-in-chief of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare, and co-editor of Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (Palgrave, 2018) and Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Palgrave, 2014).