ABSTRACT

This article turns to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594) in order to revise critical accounts of globalization and to propose a contrasting notion of “world” as a function of affective experience, collective narration, and virtual witnessing. Shakespeare’s play captures how a newly global imaginary was beginning to disrupt many of the foundations of personal identity and the familiar reference points of the worlds that sustained it. The Comedy of Errors acknowledges the integrative effects of a globalizing system while also emphasizing its multiply-centered, regional specificity; Shakespeare models not a single, totalizing globality but a plurality of worlds characterized by continuous rupture, reconfiguration, and an ongoing state of in-betweenness. Not only does the play illuminate a non-Eurocentric view of globalization but it explores the alienation that attends migration and displacement at a global scale and the ways these movements mark the body for violence and refigure the human relationships that bond people together. In doing so, the play reveals an experience of exclusion that is constitutive of race insofar as its somatic determinations follow a logic that is both incomprehensible and absolute. The play also demonstrates how dramatic processes of collective story-telling and mutual witnessing can re-world both subject and community alike, showing us how “globalization” is an historically-contingent iteration of “worlding” that is neither static, inevitable, nor permanent.

摘要

本文转向莎士比亚的《错误喜剧》（1594 年），以修正对全球化的批判性描述，并提出“世界”作为情感体验、集体叙述和虚拟见证的功能的对比概念。莎士比亚的戏剧捕捉到了一个新的全球想象如何开始破坏个人身份的许多基础以及支撑它的世界的熟悉参考点。错误的喜剧承认全球化系统的综合影响，同时也强调其以多重为中心的区域特殊性；莎士比亚建模的不是一个单一的、整体化的全球性，而是以连续破裂、重新配置和持续中间状态为特征的多个世界。该剧不仅阐明了一种非以欧洲为中心的全球化观点，而且还探讨了在全球范围内伴随着移民和流离失所的异化，以及这些运动标志着暴力的身体并重塑将人们联系在一起的人际关系的方式。在这样做的过程中，该剧揭示了一种构成种族的排斥体验，因为它的身体决定遵循一种既不可理解又绝对的逻辑。