2016 marks the quartercentenary of Shakespeare's death and the upcoming issue of Postcolonial Interventions would focus on the continued relevance of multiple Shakespeares in the culture-scape of the postcolonial world. It is true that not only were Shakespearean plays shaped in many ways by colonial discourses, especially discourses of racial difference, but Shakespearean plays also initially functioned as those "signs taken for wonders" through which the colonial administrators sought to consolidate imperial hegemony, as evident from such critical works as Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1999). However, subsequent ages witnessed both translation and localization and adaptation and transformation which contributed to manifold forms of appropriation, conditioned by differing contextual pressures and shifting equations of power, as illustrated by later works like Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (2010). Quite naturally therefore, from Aimé Césaire's adaptation of The Tempest, to Kalyan Ray's novel Eastwords to Vishal Bhardwaj's trilogy of films based on Shakespearean tragedies, the realm of postcolonial cultures has witnessed a variety of Shakespearean representations across several genres and media which have functioned as multifaceted interventions, endowed with diverse connotations. As Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia inform us in the introduction to Native Shakespeares,

"… every spring, groups of women on the Caribbean island of Carriacou prepare elaborate costumes for their boyfriends, husbands, and sons, who will wear the regalia in the long- standing annual ritual known as the Carriacou Mas, a contest in which local men dance and deliver famous passages from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The contemporary Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih pauses over page while writing Season of Migration to the North to consider the vexed experience of expressing an Arab nationalism, and what comes to mind is the face of Shakespeare's Othello, the Sudanese experience of expressing an Arab identity fixed and localized through the tragic hero's story of betrayal. The Maori broadcasting agency Te Mangai Paho chooses its first film to promote the New Zealand language te reo, Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weneti [The Maori Merchant of Venice] using Shakespeare's romantic comedy to resurrect a native language."

Moving away from a rather unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare's biography in various academic quarters, such global appropriations have created opportunities of multicultural negotiations, anti-colonial critiques, political contestations based on class, gender or race, formal experiments of diverse kinds and even critical discourses of varied theoretical orientations. In the process, the postcolonial world has testified, with a thousand different voices, to the veracity of the Bard's own prophetic pronouncements on his dramatic art:

"How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!"

The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles which would analyse the continued and seemingly inexhaustible significances of Shakespeare in postcolonial cultures, not just in terms of rewriting or dramatic performances or cinematic adaptations but also by focusing on the continued presence of Shakespeare in other forms of popular culture, education and iconography. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Political Shakespeares: critiques of race, class and gender
• Anti-colonial Shakespeares: marshalling the Bard against Empire
• Multicultural and Multilingual Shakespeares
• Shakespeare in Education
• Postcolonial Shakespearean Criticism
• Shakespeare in other media: from films to graphic novels
• Shakespearean Theatre Festivals and the Politics of Representation
• Shakespeare in Non-Western performance traditions
• Translations, Adaptations and Transcreations of Shakespeare

Submissions should be sent to the postcolonialinterventions@gmail.com within 15th March, 2016.

Submissions Guidelines:

1. Articles must be original and unpublished. Submission will imply that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
2. Written in Times New Roman 12, double spaced with 1″ margin on all sides
3. Between 4000-7000 words, inclusive of all citations.
4. With parenthetic citations and a Works Cited list complying with MLA format
5. Without footnotes; endnotes only if absolutely unavoidable
6. A separate cover page should include the author's name, designation and an abstract of 250 words with a maximum of 5 keywords
7. The main article should not in any way contain the author's name. Otherwise the article will not be considered.
8. The contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material, including photographs and illustrations for which they do not hold copyright.