Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Borrowers and Lenders Editors

CELJ President and Vice-President Debra Rae Cohen and Eugenia Zuroski (top row) with Borrowers and Lenders co-editors Sujata Iyengar (middle left), Vanessa Corredera (middle right), and Louise Geddes (bottom row).

Debra Rae Cohen: We usually begin these interviews by asking the editor about the history of the journal, and how that person got involved with it. But this is the first time we've actually interviewed somebody who was instrumental in the founding of the journal and is therefore identified so completely with its history. So I wonder if you could start us off just by talking about what lay behind the founding of the journal, what you had in mind when you when you first brought it into being and then we can talk about how it's developed since.

Sujata Iyengar:  I’m Sujata Iyengar. I teach at the University of Georgia and I'm one of the founders and original editors of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. I thought somebody should do a journal. I did not think it should be me! It seemed as though there was a need for a journal about Shakespearean adaptations. I was personally invested in this in part because how I came to Shakespeare was through adaptations. And then my late colleague and dear friend Christy Desmet asked me, “Well, yeah, why don't we do a journal?” She had just finished doing her book Shakespeare and Appropriation with Bob Sawyer. So, we founded the journal and Christy was very instrumental in the fact that our methodology is very much based on composition, pedagogy, and process writing, which is something that anyone coming on board has deal with—like, is this normal? That you're giving all these comments to people instead of desk rejecting? I mean, we do a bunch of desk rejections, don't get me wrong, but they are rare compared to the kind of the long email that will say, Oh, yes, I would love to send this out but before I even send it out, I want you to do this, this, this, and this.

Christy was probably more heavy-handed editorially than I was, initially, but I learned from her the value of clarity in writing and accessibility, and I'm always very proud when I hear from graduate students who say things like, I read you when I was an undergrad. I'm very pleased that the articles tend to be accessible enough, even when they're dealing with complex theoretical issues. The principles underlying the journal were that we had to take adaptations and appropriation as seriously as the Shakespeare; that it was about reception. What we like to do, in Jeffrey Wilson's very helpful phrase, is historical presentism. So we kind of sidestep around what have become, to me, very tired debates surrounding anachronism. You know: “Can you use theory to look at old stuff?” “Is this true to Shakespeare?” The fidelity debates. What Jeffrey Wilson said is that you could look into a historical moment and the reception of something and where something comes from deeply, with a kind of thick description of the moment. I think that's what our best articles do. And I suppose the other thing underpinning us would be Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation—that repetition with difference was what adaptation or appropriation is all about. People got really hung up in the early days on that term “appropriation,” Like “why aren't you “[Shakespeare and] adaptation”? And that was partially because the journal Adaptation was also founded right around that time. But I think that we used “appropriation” because Christy had the book Shakespeare and Appropriation, and because the Marxian underpinnings of “appropriation,” which I went with in a slightly different direction than Christy did, certainly appealed to me.  But we decided, and we wrote a later article clarifying, that we didn't really care. The article was called “Adaptation, Appropriation or What You Will,” because people got very, very bothered by the issue. And really, we don't mind as long as you tell us whose terms you're using and why.

I should also mention that Geoff Way, our Managing Editor, edited a series of interviews in Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation, and there is an interview with me talking about the origins of the journal.

Eugenia Zuroski: I'll follow up that really wonderful account of how the journal came into being with the question of where it's come since then. I know there are probably a million different ways you could narrate the journey of the journal, but what’s one way you would describe how it's come forward in time from the foundations—has it stayed pretty true to your original mission? Has it changed in any ways that you couldn't have anticipated?

SI: Definitely. And I wonder whether we should turn to Vanessa for this because I would love to know her impression coming in fresh, being of a younger academic generation.

Vanessa Corredera: I'm Vanessa Corredera. I teach at Andrews University, and I am the newest co-editor. One of the pieces of the journal that I think is really significant is the way that it has intersected with a wide array of areas and subfields within Shakespeare studies. It's gotten quite global—I mean, maybe it was global from the beginning, but there is significant global impact, with special issues on global Shakespeare, for example. And then we’ve also had a trans issue. So it's moved forward, I think, in the way that the field itself has moved forward: where the field moves to reconsider race, for example, at the center of the field rather than at the margins, the journal is doing the same thing. And the journal is not just reflective of movements in the field, but also helps lead and shape them—precisely because of the theoretical investment that Sujata was just talking about, that the journal had as part of its founding mission. The editors are guiding these pieces and asking for and giving and providing feedback because of that theoretical framing. So that when people come to Borrowers and Lenders, they're not simply getting articles that are describing an artifact. It’s deep theoretical work, trying to provide new vocabulary, new perspectives, new methodologies, for thinking about the afterlife of Shakespeare's work, broadly understood.

SI: That squares with what I would say about what you asked, the ways the journal has developed that we weren't expecting. We kind of knew it would end up with a global focus because some of those folks had been in Christy’s Shakespeare and Appropriation, but we didn't realize that by focusing on adaptation, we would end up with a more diverse pool of writers in every way. If you're a graduate student teaching freshman comp, or you’re at a small liberal arts college, or you are interested in finding ways for non-majority cultures to find themselves in Shakespeare, then adaptation is just an obvious way to go. But that hadn't occurred to us till we suddenly realized, oh, this doesn't look like what the rest of the field looks like.

DRC: Louise, what about you? When did you come onto the journal and how did you get involved with it?

Louise Geddes: I'm Louise Geddes, I’m professor of English at Adelphi University. And I got involved with the journal six, maybe seven years ago now. When I was an assistant professor, I attended the Global Appropriations conference at UGA that was being run in honor of Borrowers and Lenders, and at that time they were looking for a Digital Appropriations editor. That's my field, and I volunteered, and I've been with them ever since. It's been a wonderful experience from start to finish. The journal is a real community, and it builds community through the work that it does and the people that engage with it. One of the things I'm so proud of with the journal is that rather than a gatekeeping or audition kind of process—does your paper fit, does it pass?—we've developed a program that facilitates a more scaffolded, nurturing approach. We meet with the author, we look at the potential of an article and figure out how we can help it get to the point where it is the kind of article we can publish in the journal.

DRC: Just to follow up on what you were saying about your particular role, Louise—and I think this is a question for everybody—one of the things I have always been most struck by about Borrowers and Lenders is its deep commitment to a fully engaged use of the digital and of the affordances of being an online journal. And I wonder if you can speak to that. Was that part of your conception from the very beginning?

SI: Yes, it was. I mean, we wouldn't have done it had we known how hard it would be. This was in the early, very naïve days of Web 2.0 and we knew we didn't have any money and so Christy said, oh, we'll do it online and it will be free. Like, no! We knew nothing about what would happen. But Peter Holland gave her very good feedback—he said, You're going to have to make it archivable, you're going to have to have PDF capability so people can print it out and keep it because otherwise it's going to disappear. And in those days, Adobe had not yet become the standard. So we worked with an academic professional, a faculty member here at UGA who just volunteered his time for decades, and he wrote this program that converted HTML or XML to PDF. It's much simpler now that we're at ACMRS [Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies].

But even for them, it was kind of a challenge. That's why we have some recent issues up right now that are not yet HTML, but just PDF, because it's just so hard to do. Keeping the archiving and maintaining the digital interface was the hardest thing that we had to do, harder than anything else. And it was also great training. I'm glad not to have to do it anymore, because I never loved it the way Christy did. But training students in XML was useful; many of them went on to careers in things where they have to mark things up. And it's a good way for them to think about categories and hierarchies, you know, just thinking like a programmer. Christy always thought of it as something born digital. We’ve lost some of that innovation with the move [to ACMRS], but I think it's better that we continue to innovate intellectually. I feel like we wasted so much time on the technical part of it, and trying to find little bits of money here and there and all of that stuff that you have to do when you're a digital publisher.

LG: I agree. I mean, one of the things we used to do was embed media. And when I do miss that as a component of the essay, as somebody who had to learn tagging and XML and would take hours and hours and hours to try and tag something only to find out that it doesn't load, I think as Sujata said, it's more important to be to be intellectually attentive and to be efficient. We needed to have a reputation as a journal that runs on a particular schedule and puts out issues on time, and when you're dealing with these technical issues—and running a full-time job and a research career—I think it's really easy to let these kinds of things take a backseat and slow down production of the journal.

VC: And so I would say that the trade-off then is it still fits with the mission. Right? Because you said, Sujata, that part of that mission is accessibility and I know that you meant the accessibility of prose, but accessibility is also the fact that it's open access, which makes these essays great for teaching as well. People who are teaching composition, or are at a liberal arts college, people who don’t necessarily have the time or financial support to go to traditional archives can turn their attention to a different type of archive. But if people can't count on issues coming out, then it's not accessible. All that work gets backlogged. So the trade-off is still keeping the mission of accessibility, making sure that people are accessing this work in progress, especially given the fact of the wide array of scholars who publish in the journal.

SI: Correct. It's especially bad for early career scholars when production is delayed. I did mean access in terms of open access as well; that's another reason behind the global outreach of the journal, so that people in developing countries and Eastern Europe could access the journal.

DRC: Could you just clarify for our readership when you affiliated with ACMRS?

SI: 2020, I think? Christy passed away in 2018. And I brought Louise and Matt Kozusko up from the section editor positions because I knew I couldn't do it on my own. And then I also knew I wanted another home for the journal; we’d been looking for a while because I was fed up looking for little bits of money and looking for a server. And so we negotiated with ACMRS for a while, and eventually we figured something out. And now we have Geoff Way as our Managing Editor. We've got server space. We're hosted at the Texas Digital Library, which had to enter a brand new partnership with ACMRS in order to do this. I think we will eventually have embedded media again, Louise, I think that's the plan.

LG: This was one of Christy’s interests. And she was so good and so competent, that she just took on so much of the work herself and she had a very smooth-running machine. So I think I think part of the adjustment when she passed was just realizing the weight that she was carrying and how much of this work she did. We had to find a new way to do it.

EZ: The actual circumstances obviously vary from journal to journal, but because academic journal publishing, particularly in the humanities, tends to be an under-resourced enterprise, journals do come about because they're passion projects, and people do throw a lot of volunteer labor into making them happen, building what needs to be built. Just in the conversations we've been having for this series, but then also conversations with other journal editors more broadly, we’ve seen it's very common for a journal to get to a point where it's so heavily dependent on one person's particular involvement, that it becomes hard or frightening to imagine what happens when and if that person is no longer able to be that support. But it sounds to me like the kind of collaborative model that you've built at Borrowers and Lenders is an important kind of response to this situation. Can you talk a little bit about the team that makes the journal run and your mode of operations?

SI: In 2016, like a lot of us, I got very involved in nonprofits and some political organizing. And so that was really what lit a fire under me to deal with the sustainability problem and founder syndrome, because it occurred to me the journal was going that way. It felt really urgent when Christy passed away that I bring other people on board, people younger in their careers, if not in chronological age, for new perspectives as well. Because I felt like Christy and I gave that kind of generational diversity. We could argue about things, which I think is really helpful to do. I really like how we work as a team—it helps to use OJS [Open Journal Systems] to assign things and it really helps to have a managing editor to keep us on task. There are the usual issues with onboarding, all that kind of stuff that has to get dealt with. But I think we are quite good at delegating to each other, or saying so and so has the expertise to review this or that. What do you think, Louise?

LG: Yeah, I think so. And I think that especially when you're dealing with a field like Shakespeare adaptation, you need a large, diverse board and a large, diverse general editorship, because, you know, you're not just dealing with Shakespeare, you're dealing with Shakespeare and pop culture. It's Shakespeare and romance movies. It's Shakespeare and 1920s musicals. It's Shakespeare and Bengal. And so we need to be constantly thinking, Who does this sort of very unusual subfield that we know nothing about? How can we reach out? One of the things that we learned quite quickly is that as this field continues to expand, it's important to think about turnover of the editorial board, it’s important to think about turnover of the general editors and the advisory boards and be constantly adjusting to the new interest and the growth of the field as it happens in particular areas.

VC: Louise mentioned that she started off as a section editor, and I did as well. I think that's really significant because we would have these meetings where it would be all of us, the section editors and the general editors meeting together. And that was a great training ground, to be able to listen and to learn. I know everyone's professional experience is different, but there is no standardized training in how to be a journal editor, and so it was really helpful to be able to undergo that experience as a team and to be able to develop those relationships. And as Sujata said, then we could disagree with each other, right? Because we've already worked as a team, it is easier to consider different positions and disagree or push back or whatever it takes to move forward together.

DRC: One thing I noticed that none of you have has mentioned—something that many of us can't imagine journals functioning without—is the role of graduate students in helping to administer the journal. It sounds to me as if your collaborative does most of the work that at other journals is done by graduate students who are themselves training and learning and thinking about being editors in the future.

SI: When Christy and I ran it here she would train a graduate student in XML but she was head of first-year writing and of the Writing Center and she had a little bit of money and teaching hours to play with. And so we always had an intern to do some tagging, whom she trained. I developed an online module, an editing class that trained students in XML, and I ended up doing that with undergraduates because I didn't have any graduate students, but I'm glad not to be doing that anymore because of the time it took me to train them. Even though it turned out the XML was the easiest part. The hard part is that they're not really ready even to correspond with authors—I mean, you're like, “No, don't do a smiley face in your first message. You're dealing with a 60-year-old Shakespearean in in Bulgaria.”

So graduate students were important in the early days, though now I'm the only one who has graduate students. People ask, what advice would you have for anyone founding a journal, and it would be getting an endowment! Don't think about it without an endowment. You need somebody ideally who’s got an endowed professorship or some sort of slush fund for graduate students. We couldn't afford to offer them a full teaching assistantship, though I do get some money from our humanities center that can be used to pay students on an hourly basis. I often don't have candidates because we don't have such a big graduate program, and by the time we get them onboarded to OJS, which is not a straightforward editorial management platform, their time with us is basically over.

LG: We've experimented with different formats, but to Sujata’s point, I think it ended up being more of a pedagogical experiment than something workable or advantageous to the journal. We would spend the first half of a semester training them to do whatever it is we need to do, whether that's reading and copy editing, or, back in the old days, tagging and XML, and then we'd have to oversee that work to the point that they were ready to do it. So for us, if we can't get somebody to commit for two to three years, which is not always possible, then bringing someone on might give them the experience of being part of a community editing a journal, but it isn't necessarily beneficial to the production schedule.

EZ: But to return to the style with which you edit and vet submissions and work with authors, it sounds like you are doing a pretty fair and steady amount of mentoring on this other front, where you're working with authors who maybe don't have much or any experience publishing with scholarly journals. That’s another form of training and mentoring that we hear a desire for from students all the time: everyone's expected to publish, but there are so few opportunities unless you happen to have a very dedicated supervisor who takes the time to actually teach the process—how to send an email to the editor of a journal, those kinds of things. Do you feel that as a kind of mentorship?

SI: Oh, definitely, yeah. And especially around the world; I have far more graduate students who are thrilled to write to me from other places than here, which is fine. And you don't have graduate students at all, Louise and Vanessa, apart from the ones you work with through Borrowers and Lenders. So it's kind of a nice opportunity.

Matt Kozusko, a former co-editor who just rotated off, loves teaching XML and had great success with undergraduate students. He actually got some of those kids to tag things correctly. But I wasn't good enough at tagging myself to vet the work of the students. And Louise did a wonderful job with the undergrads on reading raw essays, like line editing and comprehension editing, which I thought was amazing.

LG: Yeah, that was really fun. I really enjoyed doing that. It was a great opportunity to introduce students to essays that we had in the system. And as I said, it works with our philosophy of helping essays to grow throughout the process—it was a great for me to just talk through some feedback they wanted to give to an author, to give the students a look at an essay still in progress, and that still has some way to go, and talk about how you give constructive feedback. I think, especially with graduate students, and also with some undergrads, their instinctive reaction is, “oh, this is no good.” They love to critique, and they love to nail down why things don't work; and I think it's very important to figure out ways to be more generous and more constructive, and to understand that criticism is always a shared work in progress.

DRC: Before we close out, I want to turn back to the content of the journal. If you wanted to introduce someone to your journal, to try to give them the best idea of what you're all about, what are what are some particular issues or articles you would send them that you think give the best picture of what you're up to?

SI: Oh, that's a fun question. I would probably send people to Alexa Joubin’s recent Shakespeare and trans studies in performance special issue, just because that hits so many of the buttons. It's cutting edge in terms of content and in terms of approach. It's multimedia—she's got recordings of the interviews as well as transcripts. And it's theoretically rigorous, but also accessible for people to read, and it's very nuanced, as well as historical. It kind of just under-the-radar deals with all these hot button issues. Lisa Starks’s piece on “Transmisogyny in Popular Culture,” for example, is exemplary on transmisogyny because she manages to have this very balanced and feminist perspective that is, as I say, very nuanced, without scoring cheap political points, but that also doesn't let itself be censored.

Cover for B&L’s special issue on Shakespeare and Trans Studies in Performance.

LG: I would offer Volume 4 Number 1, 2008, “Shakespeare and Actors of Color,” edited by Ayanna Thompson, for that exact reason. I think Shakespeare and race is is a very urgent and necessary topic. it's 2023, and people are really digging into this question of what does it mean to interpret Shakespeare through the lens of race—and back in 2008, we published that exact conversation. What is the place of Shakespeare in this discourse? And what does it mean, in America or elsewhere in the world, to produce Shakespeare and think about how race intersects with Shakespeare production adaptation? I think that what Sujata was talking about with Alexa’s trans issue, the power of being at the forefront of that conversation now, is demonstrated by the fact that we were having this conversation about race in 2008.

VC: I think I would choose Peter Erickson's article on Toni Morrison's Desdemona. I love it, because it actually brings both of your points together. He's doing a lot of really interesting work with thinking through race as he always does. But he's also demonstrating how you can work across different areas, but treat them all with care and rigor, because he does really beautiful historicist work in other publications, and it's not like he's coming to Borrowers and Lenders and then taking that rigor away. He's doing the same thing in that piece. He's theorizing what he is doing; he's using Adrienne Rich to theorize how appropriation is working in Toni Morrison's work. One of the challenges is that that is a very teachable production, but it is inaccessible in the sense that people haven't watched it themselves. They have the text of the play and students enjoy it, but people wonder, well, what was that like in performance? Very few people have been able to see it, and he was one of them. This article is taking advantage of Borrowers and Lenders as a platform to share that knowledge; he was able to publish pictures along with his analysis that help people to follow along. His thick description takes on more life, because he's able to take advantage of the access built into the journal. That’s a really exemplary piece, and one that I turn to again and again.

Screenshot from Figure 6 in Erickson’s article on Toni Morrison’s Desdemona.

SI: I’ve got two more recommendations. The late Giselle Rampaul’s article about Shakespearean Calypso. Rampaul is from the University of the Caribbean. I remember Christy and her husband, David Schiller, who's a musicologist, had vinyl recordings of those old Calypso songs, and they’re embedded in the essay as mp3s; I'm so pleased that they've managed to survive digitally. It's a beautiful essay and the recordings are there. I also love Angela Keam’s essay on Claire Danes’s Star-Body and the Shakesteen phenomenon. She must have been one of the earliest if not the first person to use that coinage, “Shakesteen.” And there it is in Borrowers and Lenders. So those are two that I teach a lot and cite a lot.

LG: I just want to say I think that's a really important service of the journal. I think scholars are empowered to decide what goes in the archive, what's legitimate Shakespeare and what isn't. Especially when you're dealing with digital ephemera, it's so easy to lose sight of people's work and these particular kinds of culturally responsive moments to Shakespeare. So the essays that dig into ephemera, or these kinds of marginalized or dismissed cultural moments in which your community is responding to Shakespeare, I think that's really, really valuable and important preservation work. Even just saying this exists, and I'm going to take note of it, really, really matters—but what we want to think about as well, is what is constituted as Shakespearean, and what is worth our notice, whose voices are listened to and who gets to say I have a Shakespearean connection. I think there's something really valuable to this kind of work. Some of the issues we’ve talked about exemplify the power and the obligation that we have to do this work. 

EZ: I think that's actually a perfect place for this conversation to land. But before we do wrap up, is there anything else that you want to say that you haven't had a chance to say?  

SI: Please have your readers keep an eye open for when we advertise, because we do like to refresh our boards and our section editors frequently to help with this issue of burnout because we all do this as a labor of love. Few if any of us get any compensation or credit from our institutions for doing it right. And we also welcome fresh perspectives. We're always looking for things for our sections, digital appropriations, appropriations and performance, and the book reviews. There are many opportunities to contribute to us. So I hope that your members will follow us and read our articles and consider contributing themselves.

References

Christy Desmet & Sujata Iyengar (2015) Adaptation, appropriation, or what you will, Shakespeare, 11:1, 10-19, DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2015.1012550

Corredera, Vanessa I., Pittman, L. Monique, & Way, Geoffrey. (2023). Shakespeare and cultural appropriation. Routledge.