Re-imagining Ethics, Rethinking Rights, and Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare
Daniel David Moses's Brébeuf's Ghost and the Specters of the Human
Abstract
"Re-imagining Ethics, Rethinking Rights, and Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare: Daniel David Moses's Brébeuf's Ghost and the Specters of the Human" retells the story of the near decimation of the Huron/Wyandot nation, a founding moment in Canada's colonial pre-history. Moore's essay interrogates Moses's play's adaptation of Shakespeare--a key colonialist symbol of cultural "authenticity”—as a strategy for reimagining and renewing First Nations Canadian history, culture, and human rights. Moses's spectral imagery and "hauntological" approach to historiography demonstrate the ways in which the occluded specters of First Nations Canadian culture haunt and disrupt their Western-centric Canadian context of enunciation. In doing so, Moore argues, Moses rethinks human rights and the very ethical subject of "humanity" as a kind of "adaptive ethics" of cultural inclusivity.