"Old" World "New" World Visions

* Read Shakespeare’s The Tempest
* Read Black Elk as told to Neihardt in Black Elk Speaks on “vision” and performance, 177-212 (in the 1979 version). The version on OCRA is expanded and the page numbers may be different. In that case read chapters 15 through 18 (with emphasis on 15 and 18).
*Leanne Simpson, Dancing on our Turtle's Back, chapter 2 and chapter 5. 

Recommended to also read:

             Paul Brown, “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine” in Political Shakespeare, ed. By J. Dollimore, 48-71; “Women, Temporary Liminality, and Two-Spirits: The Staging of Community in the Plains Indians Scalp dance’s Masquerade” Journal of Ritual Studies 13, 2 (l999); Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 119-150; Laura Bohannon,“Shakespeare in the Bush";William B. Worthen, The Idea of the Actor, 1984, pp 3-69;  A Tempest (an Afro-Caribbean revision by Aime Cesiare); Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back.

Reading Response:
1. Are there differences between Prospero’s approach to “visions”(what is that approach)  and Black Elk’s (what is that approach)?
2. Does Leanne Simpson offer a performance theory that resonates with any of the other material we have read across the semester?
3. Starting in your response with thinking between Shakespeare and Simpson, use this last reading response to think back across the semester and pull out threads that have been meaningful to you.
4. Or, devise your own question based on the readings, articulate it, and then answer it.


Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in England.

From a Spanish edition of Mandeville's Travels (Alcala, 1547).

Illustration from the earliest printed edition of Mandeville’s Travels showing some of the various races and species that Mandeville claimed to have encountered, including (clockwise from top left): the wild men with horns and hoofs; the people with eyes in their shoulders; the folk that have but one foot; and the vegetable lamb.The travel book attributed to Mandeville, which first appeared around 1371, was certainly one of the most popular books of the late Middle Ages (hundreds of medieval manuscript copies of it have survived to the present day), and it was definitely filled with bizarre fabrications. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville described the travels of an English knight who left England around 1322 and journeyed throughout Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Persia, and Turkey. His descriptions colored people's fantasies of what would be found in the "New World."

Reference for issues in Neihardt/Black Elk text

More on Black Elk/Neihardt