Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures

A late example of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s career-long interest both in theatre and in echoing Shakespeare, A Branch of the Blue Nile considers the relationship between postcolonial subjects and the culture of their former colonizers, as a Trinidadian theatre company tries to stage an indigenized Antony and Cleopatra. As well as the heritage of shame attached to his heroine’s dark skin because of its reminder of black women’s abjection during slavery, Walcott’s revision of Antony and Cleopatra also takes up questions of representation and performance. While Walcott’s career was marked by his creative negotiations with the cultural remainders of the Caribbean’s colonial past, his Trinidadian Cleopatra is finally unable to negotiate a way of being beyond her formation within the stifling regulation of her island’s sexual and racial histories.