RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series #9 – Shakespeare in/and Shanghai

Based on a chapter I am writing for an edited volume on Women and Shakespeare, this talk brings together a reading of Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights, a novelized adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in 1920s Shanghai, with my experiences as a theatregoer and Shakespeare scholar in 2020s Shanghai. I do this to bring the dynamisms of Shanghai and Shakespeare in conversation with one another. In the first part of the talk, I will focus on the novel, concentrating on its Shanghai-ness and relating it to Shanghai noir. Building on Vanessa Corredera’s arguments I use a postcolonial feminist lens to highlight that Shanghai and Shakespeare are two sides of the same coin.  In the second part of the talk, I will focus on my experiences of the immersive Macbeth adaptation Sleep No More, that I went to twice in Shanghai, as well as the exhibition “More on Sleep No More” that commemorated five years of Sleep No More in Shanghai.  I combine these two lines of thought to bring together a narrative of Chloe Gong as a woman writing Shakespeare in Shanghai, but also of myself as a woman-identifying scholar, reader, and theatregoer experiencing and writing Shakespeare in Shanghai. While the growing field of Asian Shakespeare studies has focused a lot on performance and translation traditions, this project adds to the field by focusing on feminist auto-ethnography alongside an adaptation in an Asian context.