Abstract
This essay advocates for a transborder approach to Shakespeare appropriation that unlocks insights into how different border zones overlap, entangle, and interconnect with one another. Using decolonial methodologies of Borderlands Shakespeare scholarship along with transcolonial and transborder studies to develop a Transcolonial Borderlands framework, the essay compares two Hamlet adaptations: Tara Moses’s 2018 play Hamlet, El Príncipe de Denmark and Isabella Hammad’s award-winning 2023 novel Enter Ghost. Both Moses and Hammad explore collective traumas by adapting the royal house of Denmark’s internal conflicts to the experience of peoples negotiating colonial domination. As they resist Hamlet’s frameworks of individualism, linear temporality, and binary views of life and death, Moses and Hammad turn instead to the Ghost to reimagine spectrality as a site for nurturing the healing and regeneration of Borderlands communities. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s model of border-crossing to compare the protagonists of both works, the essay discusses how Hamlet in the Transcolonial Borderlands valorizes spectrality as an alternate mode of being in and with community that heals the palimpsests of trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples, thus opening avenues for reparative justice, allyship, and artistic insight.