ABOUT THIS BOOK

This volume features a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives.

For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare’s plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US–Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition.

This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives. The editors offer a critical framework for understanding the artistic and political traditions that shape these plays and the place of Shakespeare within the multilayered colonial histories of the region. Borderlands Shakespeare plays, they contend, do not simply reproduce Shakespeare in new contexts but rather use his work in innovative ways to negotiate colonial power and to envision socially just futures.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Katherine Gillen is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. She is the author of Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage. Adrianna M. Santos is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio where she acts as cocoordinator of the Mexican American, Latinx, and Borderlands Studies interdisciplinary minor. Kathryn Vomero Santos is assistant professor of English and codirector of the Humanities Collective at Trinity University. She currently serves as Performance Reviews Editor for Shakespeare Bulletin.

REVIEWS

"The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 1 features a wide range of plays that deftly re-imagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives. Unique, ground-breaking, exceptional, thought-provoking, and inherently fascinating, The Bard in the Borderlands is a distinctive, ground-breaking, and unreservedly recommended as an addition to personal, professional, community, college, and university library Shakespeare studies collections. Of special appeal and value for readers with an interest in Hispanic American Dramas & Plays."

— Midwest Book Review

"[T]hese plays are especially attentive to the social, political, and cultural implications of representation. Meaning, in this case, that better and more accurate representations of Latinx and Indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their stories and histories of survivance create on-stage the worlds we would like to see recreated in the real world. Intertwining the stage and world, I believe, would please Shakespeare in the same way and for the same reasons it will please readers of this collection and theatrical audiences of the plays. Moving from stage to world is a significant border to cross. And yet, this volume of Latinx and Indigenous Shakespearean appropriations inspires such hopes and dreams by opening spaces for dialogue with shared learning at the center. These spaces are as open to university and college denizens as they are to activists and community organizers who mutually envision brave new worlds created and sustained by art, theater, and storytelling.
¡Que viva Borderlands Shakespeare!"

— The Shakespeare Newsletter

TABLE OF CONTENTS

General Introduction: Tracing the Traditions of Borderlands Shakespeare, by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos

Introduction to Volume I, by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos

Playtexts and Introductions
1. The Language of Flowers by Edit Villarreal
2. Kino and Teresa by James Lujan
3. The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe by Seres Jaime Magaña
4. Hamlet, El Príncipe de Denmark by Tara Moses
5. Ofélio by Joshua Inocéncio
6. ¡O Romeo! by Olga Sanchez Saltveit

Glossary

Bibliography