Vortrag vom 8. Juli 2025

“The greatest act of cowardice on the part of any man is to keep silent. It is therefore incumbent on every one of us to speak out aloud. It is my wish that this play would shock to the very core those who blandly remain tongue-tied.” (Note to the Director) – Sony Labou Tansi

The lecture examines ways of understanding “difference” and “repetition” as a space of resistance reflecting the ambiguity of the post-colonial subject. It does so by considering repetition and difference in the rewriting/adaptation of Shakespeare‘s play Julius Caesar by an African. Rewriting this play is a discursive gesture through which the question of “difference” dislocates fixed definitions in such a way that opposing cultures seem to become interminably interchangeable with one another. Shakespeare in African dress may be understood as a recuperation of agency and re-presentation by the postcolonial subject through a space opened up by cultural encounters of the colonizer and the colonized. Moi, Veuve de l‘Empire, is the French title of this version of Julius Caesar, the Congolese author and playwright Sony Labou Tansi’s Shakespearean drama. Labou Tansi is the foremost Congolese writer of the 20th century – he is the author of several novels and plays, and the founder of his own theatre group called Le Rocado Zulu Theatre de Brazzaville.

Frieda Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literature, West African cinema and its diaspora, she concentrates on contemporary matters of law, race and LGBTQIA2S+ issues. Among her publications are Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste From Bon Mbella (2019) and Rethinking African Cultural Production (2015) with Kenneth W. Harrow.