MEMOs New Encounters: Call for Papers

MEMOs (Medieval and Early Modern Orients) is a decolonial project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that seeks to further knowledge and understanding of the early interactions between England and the Islamic Worlds. The first hybrid MEMOs conference will be held in Cape Town and online from 11-14 December 2025.

The Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa is proud to be partnering with the University of Cape Town and the University of Manchester in supporting this landmark MEMOs event.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In the context of wider postcolonial and decolonial shifts that have occurred in both critical and popular thought over the past decades, we have seen growing interests in recovering and recentering histories of Islamic civilizations and their shaping influence on knowledge, systems, and technologies that we now associate with the modern world. Whether recognized as the powerful authorities that transformed trade, belief, politics, science, and art in the premodern world, or as the ‘other’ necessary for Western colonial self-fashioning, as per Edward Said’s formative theorization of them in Orientalism, there is no denying that Muslims and Islamicate societies hold a fundamental place in our (global) past. Traditions, representations, and experiences of encounters between Muslims and their non-Muslim counterparts in the ‘West’ – or the Global South and Global North respectively – have long been and remain a fundamental site of excavation for this history.

Since its launch in 2019, Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs) has aimed to collaboratively and ethically explore and disseminate these narratives of the past. The events that we have witnessed over the past year are a stark reminder of the urgency of continuing this work, in efforts to decolonize the way Muslim identities and histories are perceived in contemporary thought.

With this in mind, MEMOs is delighted to announce its first hybrid conference to be held from the 11th - 14th of December 2025, in person in Cape Town, South Africa, and online.

We invite proposals for papers, panels, and workshops that address cultural histories of medieval (500-1450 CE) and early modern (1450-1750 CE) encounters between Europeans, especially the English, and the Islamic world across Africa, Asia, and Europe. That is where the Islamic world is broadly defined as imperial and dynastic powers, caliphates, as well as individuals and communities in areas under Muslim rule.

We welcome a wide range of approaches, but are especially interested in papers that examine real and imagined Euro-Islamic interaction and exchange through literature, histories, and cultures including but not exclusive to:

  • Creative expression (including art, music, literature, and theatre)

  • Storytelling, performance, and adaptation (including, though not limited to, the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries)

  • Constructions of race (including Islamophobia and anti-Blackness)

  • Gender formation and experiences

  • Travel, migration, and hospitality

  • Global order and sovereignty

  • Maritime/Oceanic politics and tradition (especially of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans)

  • The politics of empire, rule, and dynasty

  • Diplomacy, alliance, territory and nationhood

  • Cultures of knowledge and learning

  • Publishing, translations, and print culture

  • Religion and belief

  • Disability and difference

  • Colonial discourse and mechanisms

  • Trade practices and economic transformations

  • Environments, agriculture, and ecology

  • Class and service

Interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches are encouraged.

Abstracts are invited for:

  • Individual 20-minute papers, or complete panels with up to three speakers

  • Roundtable discussions (1 hour) of up to five speakers

  • Proposals for plenary workshops (1-2 hours) that explore teaching or research methodologies

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

AMBEREEN DADABHOY (HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE)

SU FANG NG (VIRGINIA TECH UNIVERSITY)

Please submit proposals (250 words) and a short bio (150 words) to the organizing committee at memorientsconference@gmail.com by 1 March 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by late March.

In-person delegates will be invited to attend workshops, events, and cultural excursions, to be hosted in collaboration with our conference partners. Proposals should indicate whether delegates will attend the event in person or online.

Basotho! Bapedi! O ka bala Shakespeare ...

Two recent additions to our collection of South African Shakespeare translations will be of interest to Sesotho and Sepedi speakers: K.E. Ntsane’s Mohwebi wa Venisi (The Merchant of Venice) and C.N.M. Phatudi’s Julease Sisare (Julius Caesar).

Ntsane’s Mohwebi was published in 1961. This was the first translation of a Shakespeare play to be produced in Sesotho, and it remains the only known full translation. (Isaac Mahloane’s Romeo le Juliet, which appeared in 1964 to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, is a prose synopsis of the play.)

Kemuel Edward Ntsane was born in 1920 in Lesotho. He wrote three novels and two volumes of poetry in Sesotho, documenting the experiences of Basotho migrant workers who had travelled to Johannesburg and the reef to work on the mines, and presenting gentle satirical takes on love gone wrong, the nostalgia of old age or the false piety of the religious (the scholar Johannes Lenake has written extensively on this). Ntsane’s poetic imagination was fuelled equally by the mountain vistas of Lesotho, the conventions of praise poetry, and the grim daily rounds of life in the mining compounds.

You can page through Ntsane’s text here, or download a searchable PDF from Shakespeare ZA’s Translations section.

Mohwebi wa Venisi is also available via the Sol Plaatje Archive of Shakespeare in African Languages (a project of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at Wits University), which collects and catalogues digital copies of translations of Shakespeare’s plays from across the African continent.

C.N.M. (sometimes referred to as N.C.) Phatudi was one of the more prolific South African Shakespeare translators of the twentieth century, producing versions of Julius Caesar, King Henry IV Part One and The Merchant of Venice. The latter text was the last to be published (in 1985) but the first of Phatudi’s translations to be added to Shakespeare ZA’s collection and the Sol Plaatje Archive. Julease Sisare, the new addition, appeared with Better Books in 1971 but this first edition includes a foreword by P.C. Mokgokong of the University of South Africa dated 1965. 1 Henry IV, also published by Better Books, came out in 1973.

The legacy of Cedric Namedi Makepeace Phatudi is a complicated one. He was a teacher, then a school principal, then a supervisor of schools, then a school inspector (he was president of the national body of Inspectors of Bantu Education for over two decades) and eventually Minister of Education in the ‘Homeland’ or Bantustan of Lebowa. Phatudi, whose father had been chief of the Mphahlele people (Kgosi Mmutle III, the subject of Phatudi’s 1966 historical drama), crafted a political path for himself from the 1960s.

By 1973, he was Chief Minister of Lebowa. He was very conscious, given this role, of being perceived as an apartheid crony. Certainly, he was accommodationist in his approach – conciliatory, insisting that different race groups need one another – but he tried to twist the apartheid government’s notion of Separate Development into “a means to an end”. He probably overestimated his negotiating power; while he was successful in persuading Pretoria to allow the exiled writer and intellectual Es’kia Mphahlele to return to South Africa, for instance, he was put squarely in his place when he tried to secure Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

Despite his anti-apartheid rhetoric, Phatudi was arguably naïve in his hopes that the apartheid state would adopt a federal system in which black South Africans, via “one man one vote” in the homelands, could have meaningful representation in government. Nevertheless, his legacy as an educationist and as a promoter of Sepedi remains significant.

The Tempest returns to Cape Town

The full programme of the 2025 Maynardville Open-Air Festival has been announced, along with the cast of a production of The Tempest to be directed by Sylvaine Strike.

Antoinette Kellerman (photo: Claude Barnardo)

Under the theme “Waves of Wonder”, the 2025 open-air season at Maynardville will run from 22 January to 8 March. The opening concerts include Tour de Tchaikovsky, an evening of chamber music, and Stormy Weather, in which the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra will “explore composers’ expressions of nature’s elements”. During the course of February, Jonathan Roxmouth will headline Sunday in the Park with Sondheim and Cape Town Opera will present a series of extracts from Shakespeare-themed operas.

*

Jefferson Lan and Jane de Wet (photo: Claude Barnardo)

The main attraction at Maynardville each year is, of course, a production of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Next year, that play is The Tempest - and it will star doyenne of the South African stage, Antoinette Kellerman, as Prospero.

Albert Pretorius will play Caliban and Daniel Lasker will play Ariel, with Jane de Wet and Jefferson Lan as Miranda and Ferdinand. Other cast members include David Viviers (Antonio), Brent Palmer (Alonso), Tankiso Mamabolo (Sebastian/Trinculo), Siya Mayola (Gonzalo) and Len-Barry Simons, Naoline Quinzin and Lungile Lallie (Spirits). 

Niall Griffin is designing the costumes and set, lighting is by Oliver Hauser, and Wessel Odendaal will compose an original score and soundtrack, with sound design by David Classen.

*

Tickets are available via the Maynardville Open-Air Festival website or directly from Quicket.

What might Shakespeare have to do with social justice today?

Sandra Young (photo: Nasief Manie / UCT)

Last week, as part of the University of Cape Town’s Inaugural Lecture Series, Professor Sandra Young delivered a lecture entitled “Exploring the Literary Imagination in Times of Reckoning: What might Shakespeare have to do with social justice today?”

Young (who, as former Head of English Literary Studies at UCT, is also former vice-president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and co-convenor of the Society’s congresses in 2019 and 2023) began her talk by presenting an overview of her research in the fields of Shakespeare studies, South African literary and cultural studies, and heritage/memory studies over the past two decades. Her scholarship pursues questions of social justice in works both imaginative and historical. Young’s 2019 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. The Early Modern Global South in Print (2015) traces the emergence of a racialised ‘South’ in early modern maps, geographies, and natural histories. Her current book project (which began during her fellowship earlier this year at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC) is a performance history of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, reflecting on the spectre of slavery within public culture, from 1660 until today. 

Prof Young and colleagues before the event (photo: Nasief Manie / UCT)

It was thus apt that her lecture focused on The Tempest in offering answers to the question, “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?” Here Young took her cue from Saidiya Hartman who, addressing the ethics and practice of writing about the lives of the enslaved, has asked: “What are the stories one tells in dark times?” This has implications for the writing of history, as well as creative practice, and indeed literary studies - which some regard as an elitist pursuit. But the discipline, Young argued, is also well placed to analyse how cultural practices can secure the interests of the powerful, or challenge them.

The Tempest, as a play that gives pointed attention to slavery and colonisation, offers a rewarding case study. Given the play’s wildly different interpretations historically, archival research tells a fascinating story: before abolition, Shakespeare’s version was almost never performed but was replaced by adaptations that shifted the emphasis away from the figure of Caliban. The enslaved character was thus not treated as human, as one whose plight deserves attention. Later, the treatment of Caliban in the nineteenth century ranged from Coleridge’s “sympathetic imagination” to early eugenics. At the turn of the twentieth century, The Tempest was used to celebrate immigration in the United States; more recently, the figure of Sycorax has been incorporated into memorials to those who died in the Middle Passage. The play thus gestures towards an “underwater archive”. Contemporary artists like Madeline Sayet (Where We Belong) continue to reimagine the play to address the concerns of a new generation.

The lecture can be watched on YouTube. In this video, the event is opened by UCT Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof Jeff Murugan. Young is introduced by Dean of the Humanities, Prof Shose Kessi. Prof Chris Thurman of Wits University gives a response and expression of thanks in closing.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa 37: Shakespearean Ends

Volume 37 (2024) of Shakespeare in Southern Africa, the journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, will be published later this month! Like volume 36, it contains articles developed from papers that were presented at the “Shakespeare Towards An End” conference in May last year (the Society’s twelfth triennial congress, co-hosted by the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre).

There is also a fascinating Roundtable on the Baxter Theatre’s production of Othello staged in April 2024 (and returning for a short run at the Woordfees in Stellenbosch from 28 September).

In this post, exclusive to Shakespeare ZA, co-editors Chris Thurman and Marguerite de Waal share their two-part Editorial, providing an overview of the contents and also making an important announcement about the journal’s future.

Volume 37 of Shakespeare in Southern Africa (2024) bears the title, “Shakespearean Ends”. In the first instance, this is a nod to “Shakespeare Towards An End” – the theme of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s twelfth triennial congress, co-hosted by Wits University’s Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, held at Spier Wine Farm in May last year. Volume 36 of the journal (2023) took the conference theme as its title; it included nine research articles and a creative work, each of which was developed from a paper first presented at the conference. The articles in the present volume likewise have their origins in the “Shakespeare Towards An End” conference, and in one sense “Shakespearean Ends” extends the riff: “ends” here referring to many possible things, as the conference Call For Papers suggested, ranging from the utilitarian, the activist or the purposive to the conclusive/concluding – the final. (It is in the latter set of connotations that “Shakespearean Ends” finds its secondary meaning, but more about that later).

The volume opens with Lydia Valentine’s article on race, degeneration and kinship in King Lear, which shows how early modern discourses of degeneration were imbricated with varying ideas of race and identifies these discourses in King Lear, arguing that the articulation of familial difference has racial implications for the way that we read Cordelia, Goneril and Regan. Valentine notes that while Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) “has done vital work to demonstrate that race was conceptually available to early modern writers such as Shakespeare”, plays such as King Lear “have not received the same attention as others within this field”. Valentine’s article is, then, an indication of how much more generative PCRS can yet be in critical engagements with Shakespeare’s work. In the final article in the volume, however, David Schalkwyk signals an ambivalent tone regarding the self-regenerating field of Shakespeare studies; like influential or even dominant critical modes before it, such as New Historicism, Premodern Critical Race Theory may also be co-opted into the academy’s relentless drive to (re)produce “Shakespeare without End”. Here, Schalkwyk suggests, “Shakespeare towards an end” – the ends or aims being “to show the degree to which Shakespeare has always been implicated in racist thought, to challenge that complacent racism by revealing its complicity in a broader set of social attitudes and forms of exploitation and repression, and to offer an emancipatory programme that will change both the study of early modern texts and transform an academy that is and has been overwhelmingly white” – forms a “paradoxical union” with the “apparently antagonistic” position of “endless Shakespeare” (which is, like Jonson’s Shakespeare, “not of an age but for all time”).

In between Valentine and Schalkwyk are three articles that focus on Shakespeare in/and Africa, specifically South Africa and Ghana. Stephen Collins and Nii Kwartelai Quartey explore the context and the legacy of Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet, a 1964 film produced by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) with staff and students from the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama. This curiously neglected film represents, the authors argue, the high point of Kwame Nkrumah’s cultural policy; two years later, Nkrumah was ousted in a coup. Collins and Quartey discuss the film as “a clear example of decolonial practice” despite, or perhaps because of, “its own denial of radical adaptation”. Giuliana Iannaccaro and Henry Bell’s articles draw our attention to South African Shakespeares almost a century apart: H.I.E. Dhlomo’s incorporation of Shakespearean material into his historical Zulu plays Dingane and Cetshwayo (written in the 1930s) and the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s #lockdownshakespeare initiative in 2020. Iannaccaro notes that Dhlomo’s work may be read as either “celebration” of or “opposition” to Shakespeare (and by implication the legacy of British colonialism) but that these two readings “are not in conflict”; instead, together they “testify to the great complexity underlying not only the literary activity of black early-twentieth-century writers but also their thorny position in the cultural context of their time”. Bell compares the “situated” performances in #lockdownshakespeare – self-recorded videos produced by South African actors in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic – to the “generalised African aesthetics” of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar, and finds the latter wanting in terms of its distance (geographically, culturally and otherwise) “from the semiosphere of the location which it attempted to represent”.

Volume 37 ends on a high note with a roundtable discussion on the production of Othello directed by Lara Foot and performed at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in April 2024 (a version of the production had previously been staged at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus in September 2023). This Othello was notable for its use of isiXhosa, Afrikaans and German alongside Shakespeare’s English, as well as for its design concept and adaptations in terms of setting (colonial German South West Africa) and plot (particularly the murder of Desdemona). The roundtable is a wide-ranging conversation – a 12,000-word humdinger – and includes some rigorous exchanges between the contributors. Foot is joined by two of her collaborators, designer Gerhard Marx and translator Sanele kaNtshingana, with further perspectives from professor of psychology Shose Kessi and playwright and arts activist Mike van Graan.

It is only appropriate, then, that the cover of volume 37 features an image from this production: Atandwa Kani as Othello and Carla Smith as Desdemona, photographed by Fiona MacPherson. I must admit to a further motivation for this choice, which is that it results in a pleasing symmetry – for Kani, in the role of Ariel in the 2009 Baxter-RSC production of The Tempest, also appeared on the cover of volume 21 of Shakespeare in Southern Africa. That was the first volume of the journal I edited, and it now seems like an impossibly long time ago. I took over the editorship from Brian Pearce, who had succeeded Laurence Wright, who had in turn inherited the mantle from founding editor Guy Butler. In various editorials over the years, I have paid tribute to my predecessors and have also wrestled with questions about the journal’s identity, purview and purpose, which – like those of the Society of which it is the official scholarly publication – have in some ways have changed significantly and in others have remained similar, if not the same, since its first volume in 1987.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa has published hundreds of research articles, essays and reviews in that time. This is, in its own right, a remarkable body of scholarship, both constituting its own academic sub-field and making a prominent contribution to Shakespeare studies as a global field. But the time has come to bring one era to an end, and to start another one. I am delighted not only that I can hand over sole editorship of the Society’s journal to my brilliant co-editor of volumes 36 and 37, Marguerite de Waal, but also that Marguerite can announce an exciting new direction for the publication. It remains for me to express my sincere gratitude to the dozens – probably hundreds – of colleagues who have helped to produce Shakespeare in Southern Africa over the past fifteen years: authors who have submitted their work to the journal, guest editors, typesetters and designers (especially Liz Gowans), peer reviewers, editorial advisors, board members and patrons, Shakespeare Society members, and colleagues at the Grahamstown Foundation and the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (in particular Carol Leff). It has been a great privilege indeed to edit Shakespeare in Southern Africa.

CT

 

The scope of this volume, ranging from historical to contemporary adaptation and allusion, from text to stage to screen, from the local to the global, suggests the breadth of scholarly interest represented in current Shakespeare studies. The focus on Premodern Critical Race Studies in the pieces that bookend this collection of work also indicates important transformations in the field that offer new points of inquiry as well as opportunities for disciplinary self-reflection. Alongside these articles are those that consider the work of South African and Ghanaian writers, film-makers, and actors working with Shakespeare. The picture that emerges is one of scholars and artists with contextually specific but also implicitly interconnected concerns. While PCRS has a particular significance within the context of American scholarship, connected to the broader activism of Critical Race Theory and the Black Lives Matter movement, its applications are far-reaching. As it challenges the compartmentalisations of historical period and the accompanying discourses about race, it also overlaps with postcolonialism, decolonisation, and other approaches to Shakespeare that challenge the assumed relationships between past and present and between the Global North/South. This feels particularly relevant to the changing context of this journal. The variety contained in volume 37 reflects the fact that the work published in the journal has extended beyond the geographical delimitation suggested by its title. Contributions have not only viewed Shakespeare in southern Africa and from southern African perspectives, but also in and from elsewhere in Africa and, indeed, the rest of the world. Poised for change as it is, this volume will be the last that falls under the title of Shakespeare in Southern Africa.

The new name, reflecting an official shift in the journal’s identity, will be Bakwethu: A Journal of Shakespeare Studies. Taken from K.E. Masinga’s isiZulu translation-adaptation of Julius Caesar into a radio drama in the 1950s, the main title honours the publication’s South African origin. In Masinga’s work, the speech hailing “friends, Romans, countrymen” became “Zihlobo, Bakwethu, MaRomani”. This reference in naming the journal takes advantage of the rich linguistic potential of “Bakwethu”, which translates to “compatriots” but also, more casually, “companions”: “my people”. The reference also maintains the situatedness of the journal as an important part of its identity: it “speaks” from a southern, African location and perspective. At the same time, “Bakwethu” implies a sense of community and conviviality that extends to anyone within earshot. For the journal, it is an invitation to fellow-Shakespeareans everywhere to listen up and join in. While the new journal will include studies in translation, cultural adaptation, and performance of Shakespeare in/and/from Africa and the Global South, it extends an open invitation to work that disrupts the boundaries suggested by national or geographic categories, and that explores proximities and resonances between points of engagement in the shared space provided by Shakespeare studies.

This is a major step forward that would not have been possible without the contributions and the academic and administrative labour that have sustained and made Shakespeare in Southern Africa what it is today. The extensive scholarship represented in the back catalogue of the journal will remain available to access, and an essential legacy that supports Bakwethu moving forward. In particular, I want to highlight the initiative and dedication of Chris Thurman in steering SiSA through the last fifteen years. His generosity of attention, time, and effort has been of immeasurable value to the scholars who have submitted to the journal during his editorship, and to the colleagues who have worked with him to put together each of the sixteen volumes he has worked on during this time. It has been a privilege to receive his support and mentorship as a co-editor of the last two volumes.

There will be a period of transition before the first issue of Bakwethu, currently scheduled for 2026. However, the brief pause in publication does not imply a pause in activity, and we are open for submissions. To all contributors, past and prospective: I hope you will join the conversation.      

MDW