Session 4b: Shifting Narratives

5th Global Conference

Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Who Steals the Magician’s Art?: Intercultural Interpretation of the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s The Tempest
Jui-Sung Chen
Language Center, Nanhua University, Taiwan

The Contemporary Legend Theatre has aimed at producing intercultural performances since the troupe adapted Shakespeare’s Macbeth into Peking Opera in Taiwan in 1986. In 2004, Wu Hsing-kuo, the leader of the troupe, invited Hark Tsui, a Hong Kong New Wave film director, to reproduce Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Peking Opera. However, such an intercultural adaptation has been criticized and regarded as “cultural collage,” and Patrice Pavis even thinks that such theatrical appropriation is like a cultural vampire which merely “turns the alien culture to its own end.” In order to explore the problems of the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s theatrical reproductions, we take the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s The Tempest and discuss the related issues in three sections in this paper: 1) the adaptors’ perspectives on their theatrical reproduction, 2) a comparison of the original and the theatrical adaptation, and 3) the problems of the theatrical reproduction. In this paper, we would like to propose to evaluate the theatrical appropriation/reproduction which is regarded as stealing in the encounters of cultural exchanges between the target culture and the source culture in postmodern Taiwanese theatre.

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(Re-) making Culture for Sale: The Strategic Commodification, Construction and Performance of ‘Traditional’ Cultural Identity in South African Cultural Villages
Annemi Conradie
Department of Fine Art, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

My paper will investigate the ways in which cultural identities are constructed through their commodification for tourist consumption in contemporary South African cultural villages.

Since the mid-1990s, cultural tourism has been promoted ardently by the ruling African Nationalist Congress (ANC) as catalyst for local economic development. Cultural villages, often custom built ‘homesteads’ where visitors can experience ‘living’ displays of indigenous, traditional culture, were first constructed in the 1980s, and today there are over 40 such enterprises in the country.

This commodification of ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ culture for tourist consumption within the post colony that is contemporary South Africa has not gone uncontested. Scholars have criticised these ventures of simply recasting older racial and ethnic categories within current popular discourses of multiculturalism and ‘rainbowism’.

The commodification of culture has further been condemned as a cause of the debasement and disintegration of indigenous culture.

However, for many communities the commodification of cultural identity and heritage has become integral to the legitimizing and sustaining of a unique identity within a global, neo-liberal marketplace where the sale of labour has been replaced by the sale of services, culture and identity. Apart from creating employment and creating income, some individuals and groups have seized the opportunities presented by the cultural tourism industry to construct their own identities, readdressing and subverting entrenched stereotypes through their choices of self-representation.

Through an analysis of the infrastructure of selected cultural villages, their performances and the visual texts produced for and by these ventures, this paper will attempt to provide an understanding of cultural commodification that allows for the possibilities it presents for the construction and remaking of identities. I will argue that the strategic commodification of culture may offer marginalized communities the opportunity to subvert stereotypical images of themselves by remaking and actively promoting the signifiers of their own cultural identities.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)