Glocal Shakespeare in Albania: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Cultural Identity

Glocal thinking redistributes Shakespeare’s cultural capital and reimagines Shakespeare studies as a multiplex and integrative network without an original, authoritative Shakespeare at its center. Local Shakespeare criticism focuses exclusively on local place and culture, whereas global Shakespeare explores local adaptations with an international scope that risks homogenizing local identities. I challenge the local/global dichotomy and submit that Shakespearean adaptations are never either global or local. Instead, they are always already glocal insofar as they are translated and performed in a culturally and technologically interconnected network of local and global Shakespeare users. I argue that the intercultural processes of adaptation constitute non-Anglophone Shakespeares as culturally, temporally, and spatially glocal. I hope to show that glocal methodologies in marginalized countries like Albania, which historically lack scholarly attention, are necessary to defuse Shakespeare’s global authority over localities. To reveal how adaptations are multitemporal, multispatial, and multicultural, I employ Jonathan Gil Harris’ palimpsest metaphor which traces both past and present meanings in cultural objects. Specifically, I examine the palimpsestic nature of adaptations through socio-political constructs in translations and performances of Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and II Henry VI from pre-communist to post-communist Albania. Shakespeare critics need a glocal methodology that reciprocates the palimpsestic nature of non-Anglophone Shakespeare adaptations in order to better understand the adaptations and value their contributions to the field.