Cultural Inclusivity and Student Shakespeare Performances in Late-Colonial Singapore, 1950–1959

Summary

An important part of the ongoing quest to make literary education more inclusive has involved recognizing the individuals who have enriched Shakespeare studies over the years. This includes acknowledging the students and teachers operating within that most unlikely of places: the colonial school. While Gauri Viswanathan argued that, in British India, ‘the Eurocentric literary curriculum of the nineteenth century’ was ‘a vital, active instrument of Western hegemony’, a growing number of critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the students and teachers within the colonial English literature classroom refused to accept imperial diktat, and instead re-interpreted Shakespeare on their own terms.