by Lemuel A. Johnson

This complex work explores "constellations of encounters and evidence of import in various contexts, ranging from Oxford to the popular stage in Bombay, and from North America's various negotiations of its putative European ancestries to Shakespeare's reception in Africa as compared with that in Europe and the Americas." "The esthetics and ethics involved in the collecting of (other) people's cultural property," cautions the author, "can be a complicated business. The rites and the rights of such collections are complex... The power of any master(ing) text, and of its translatability, can therefore become occasion for faith or else for agnosticism, if not outright apostasy--and this within as well as across cultural boundaries."