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

Talk series9 Dr Anandi RAO talkbannerupdated

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Date

14 Jun 2024
Organiser

Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture
Time

16:00 - 17:30
Venue

HJ619, PolyU and online via Zoom

Speaker

Dr Anandi Rao

Enquiry

Ms Carmen LAW 34008979 rcchc@polyu.edu.hk

Remarks

This talk will be delivered in English

Summary

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.

Keynote Speaker

Dr Anandi Rao

Assistant Professor of South Asian Studies

SOAS, University of London

Dr Anandi Rao is a lecturer (assistant professor) in South Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her work lies at the intersection of postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, translation studies and Shakespeare studies. Her work has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Studies in South Asian Film and Media and South Asian Review. Prior to SOAS, she was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai.

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