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Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (review)

In 1996, Bill Readings published The University in Ruins, an intriguing discussion of the culture wars and of the social mission of the university. In 1999, Thomas Cartelli published Repositioning Shakespeare and gave us a Shakespeare well suited to the ruined institution that, according to Readings, the contemporary university has become. The university in ruins is one whose social mission no longer obtains. That mission— clearly ideological—was “the production of national subjects under the guise of research into and inculcation of culture, culture that has been thought . . . inseparable from national identity.”1 Readings asserted that “culture matters” only to the extent that the nation-state matters,“and the decline of the nation-state means that the question of power is no longer structured in terms of the inclusion or exclusion of subjects from cultural participation.”2 No longer devoted to fashioning subjects for the state, the university becomes “an autonomous bureaucratic corporation . . . devoted to the pursuit of excellence,” and culture becomes anything and everything, as the rise of cultural studies demonstrates.3 A ruined Bard, a Shakespeare in ruins, then, is one who no longer serves to produce “national subjects,” and such is the Shakespeare that Cartelli describes and promotes. In assessing various postcolonial repositionings of Shakespeare, Cartelli concludes that we have arrived at the possibility of a “decommissioned Shakespeare” (169), a Shakespeare who is no longer useful to “selfand national definition” (23) and is thus a ruined Bard for a ruined university. Both Readings and Cartelli wish to be optimistic about the ruination or decommissioning of our institutions and our objects of study. Both urge us to stake out new ways of being literary intellectuals within institutions—and societies—in which culture no longer matters. Rather than bemoan a “comparatively diminished” Shakespeare (170), Cartelli asks us to see the promise in a Shakespeare “liberat[ed] from an interpretive consensus that has colonized his plays just as surely as the plays have imposed themselves on subjects, both colonial and domestic, who have grown up in the shadow of Othello, Caliban, and Jack Cade” (169). Circulating more freely, such a liberated Shakespeare