Postcolonial Drama

Classics have generally been perceived from the angle of the Greco-Roman literary contributions. The Renaissance scholars pronounced these contributions more through their humanistic studies and revelations of the profundity of classical literary materials. They defended the classical ethics prescribed for different literary genres, like Aristotle's three unities. A deconstruction of the classical tradition will reveal some characters that reverberate from the Greco-Roman epoch to the contemporary time. It is, therefore, not surprising that contemporary writers refract these classical characters to satisfy diverse contemporary needs. Another perspective to classics, which will be the primary domain of this study, is the timeless reverberations of some literary creations, exclusive of the Greco-Roman canon, which may include characters, events and motifs in literary texts. These reverberations make these classic creations become timeless with infinite importance in different periods. This reconceptualisation of the classics aptly describes some typical female characters in Femi Osofisan's drama texts. This study, therefore, interrogates some revolutionary female characters in selected plays of Osofisan. This interrogation will be based on their classic roles and how these typical roles have made them to stand the test of time, therefore, making the female characters a model in contemporary time.

This article examines the ways in which two prominent Nigerian playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Esiaba Irobi, re-envision common perceptions of the Nigerian armed forces as portrayed in literature. Despite nearly two decades of often-tumultuous democratic rule, Nigeria is yet to attain full membership of the league of democratic nations. In The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road, Soyinka and Irobi respectively look at the ways in which authoritarian regimes have sought to repress and subjugate hapless indigenous populations. The country increasingly finds itself between two psychological dispositions: the traumatized psyche occasioned by the military in the past, and the democratic dispensation which represents the present. Soyinka's artistic commitment is ostensibly demonstrated in constant questioning and an accusatory historicization of the role of the military in the tragedy of Nigeria's decadence in his play, The Beatification of Area Boy, while Irobi dramatizes the weaving together of the historical massacre of the peasants of Bakolori by the army in Northern Nigeria. The important question raised by this article is: How does the Nigerian nation-state atone for the evils of brutality, torture, forceful evacuation and displacement perpetrated by the military on its citizens, especially the Ilaje 'Maroko evacuees' and the Fulani victims of the 'Bakolori massacre'? The article concludes that Soyinka's and Irobi's deft appropriations of historiography have been utilized to explore the inherent complexity of the interplay of Nigeria's political anomie for the interrogation of military dehumanization of defenceless Nigerians in The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road.

This article focuses on the relationship between performance and hospitality as a framework for thinking through postcolonial dynamics in the work of two Caribbean playwrights. In Guadeloupean Maryse Condé's Pension les Alizés (The Tropical Breeze Hotel) and St. Lucian Derek Walcott's Pantomime, ideas of hospitality, as well as the broader notion of accommodating others in a space one figures as one's own, are central to illustrating issues of diasporic cultural identity, legacies of racialized sexuality, and resistance in the face of neocolonialism. Furthermore, both plays link the phenomenon of hospitality to that of performance, such that exercises in hospitable giftgiving and interpersonal accommodation are made manifest in both literal and figurative acts undertaken for the consumption of others. Ultimately, the relationship between performance and hospitality reveals a key postcolonial dynamic: whereas the legacy of Francophone and Anglophone colonialism in the Caribbean pre-scripts the roles of host and guest, the relationship between performance and hospitality dramatizes the ambivalence with which both Condé and Walcott approach the figures of host and guest, as well as the process of accommodating oneself to the seemingly renewed codes of conduct structuring a postcolonial polity. This article begins by briefly tracing the analytical trajectories of the terms "performance" and "hospitality" in postcolonial criticism, then explores their connection in the work of Condé and Walcott. In doing so, it argues that a focus on the question of postcolonial accommodation sidesteps the familiar tendency to study Caribbean literature through the binary framework of resisting or reifying colonial legacies.

Sadallah Wannous (1941-1997), the leading Syrian dramatist, who spent most of his production years exhorting the masses to uphold the values of freedom and democracy, warns, in his late plays, of the perils of global capitalism. In his allegorical play, The Mirage Epic (1995), he comments on the modernization of Arabic societies through the interaction of a small village with a wave of economic investment. As Abboud Al-Ghawi, a Faustian figure, transforms the village into a huge tourist and commercial establishment, the village is swarmed with commodities, and people gradually become opportunistic. The play presents a panoply of characters symbolizing a mosaic of stereotypes in an unnamed Arabic society: the romantic poet, the compromising cleric, the unyielding idealist, the peasant who loses his land, and the women who are fascinated with the sparkle of possessions. The introduction of free market capitalism changes the indigenous culture. The depiction of people's humanity and capacity to love is mainly informed by pre-wealth and post-wealth conditions. As the agrarian system is uprooted and people are converted to a life of commercialism, they are irretrievably caught up in the vicious circle of financial need and moral depravity. The byproducts of modernity-materialism and consumerism-are presented as facets of globalization which, in turn, is dramatized as a new form of colonialism that deeply affects people and controls them.

William Shakespeare's major tragic plays during Indian imperialism and postcolonial interventions displayed four-fold aspects of human life: social, ethical, political, and spiritual. In the Indian response to Shakespeare, his plays underwent remarkable favorable transformations due to various similarities between the Indian dramatic tradition and Elizabethan drama, which mediated the reception of the geographical, historical, ethnic, and ideological differences between the two cultures, countries, and contexts. Indian epic female characters and Shakespearean well-known female characters are seated together at the literary reception table of feministic themes, tone, attitudes, conditions, cultural and selfidentity perspectives, and presentation equally in a mythological, philosophical, and anthropological manner under the umbrella of male hegemony. These female characters were good and evil, virtuous and wicked, heroines and villains. In this article, an attempt has been made to shed light on two major female characters in the tragedies of Shakespeare: Cordelia in King Lear and Desdemona in Othello. Both the female characters were pure, innocent, and noble-hearted, and they were full of the qualities and characteristics of the tinge and tincture of Indian ethos. However, before we try to eye these characters through the lens of Indian ethos, some light, in general, has been thrown on Shakespeare's works and his female characters.

The changing identity discourses of race, gender, and language in postcolonial Malaysia form the focus of this chapter, which examines how Hang Li Po—a legendary Chinese princess who was said to have married the Sultan of Melaka in the fifteenth century—has been translated via drama and performance in two contemporary plays produced more than a decade apart: a 1982 Malay-language bangsawan (Malay opera) titled Puteri Li Po (Princess Li Po) by Rahmah Bujang and a 1998 multilingual monodrama titled Hang Li Poh—Melakan Princess by Ann Lee. Revised as a historical figure in Malaysian textbooks, Hang Li Po has been ideologically positioned in ways that bear critical implications for Malaysian Chinese identity and Chinese-Malay relations in the nation space. Drawing on performance translation in the analysis of the dramatic appropriations and revisions of Hang Li Po, this chapter thus considers how both plays critically engage with local and/or global discourses of their time, and what they reveal in terms of the translational politics of identity and representation. In the analysis, the questions of how Malaysia as an idea is imagined and articulated, and what it means to be Malaysian, are also addressed.