Postcolonial Theatre

This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre. This anthology encompasses both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts, all dealing with imperialism and its aftermath. It includes work from Canada, the Caribbean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand and Australia. A general introduction outlines major themes in postcolonial plays. Introductions to individual plays include information on authors as well as overviews of cultural contexts, major ideas and performance history. Dramaturgical techniques in the plays draw on Western theatre as well as local performance traditions and include agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry. The plays dramatize diverse issues, such as: *globalization * political corruption * race and class relations *slavery *gender and sexuality *media representation *nationalism

The tendency to release the self from restricting ideological frameworks in the plays of the later phase of the Syrian playwright Sa'dallah Wannous' career led to the emergence in his work of the private space of the individual and to the appearance of recognizable autobiographical elements . Representing the self in these plays is an element of a new dramaturgy, which is based on a major theme common to these works: the tension between the individual/private space and the collective space.

Cet article analyse la façon dont la tragédie d’Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) et le film de Raoul Peck (n.1953) mettent en scène les derniers mois de la vie de Patrice Lumumba et la fin du Congo belge. Dans la première partie, nous reviendrons sur les contextes historiques respectifs des deux œuvres. Il nous semble en effet que ceux-ci éclairent singulièrement ce que la pièce et le film font du personnage de Lumumba. Ce travail préalable sur le contexte historique nous permettra ensuite d’affiner l’analyse comparée des deux œuvres. Il s’agira alors de dégager leurs caractéristiques formelles, de saisir comment l’une et l’autre disent la fin de la période coloniale et la mort de Lumumba avec les moyens propres au théâtre et au cinéma. Dans sa dernière partie, cette analyse filmique et textuelle décrira la façon dont la tragédie et le film construisent un espace fictionnel double, avec d’un côté la scène officielle (La Table Ronde de janvier-février 1960) et de l’autre les coulisses où se joue le futur du Congo indépendant et de son Premier-ministre.

Abstract
This article examines how Une saison au Congo (1966-1973) a tragedy by Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), and Lumumba (2000), a film by Raoul Peck (b.1953), depict the last months of Patrice Lumumba’s life and the end of the Belgian Congo. Firstly, it addresses the historical contexts of the two works, which are essential to grasp how the play and the film enact Lumumba as a character. This preliminary work on the historical context will enrich the comparative analysis, which focusses the formal characteristics of the two works, namely how they address the end of the colonial period and the death of Lumumba through devices from the theatre and the cinema. The last section examines how the tragedy and the film construct a double fictional space: on one side, the official scene (La Table Ronde from January-February 1960) and, on the other, the backstage where the future of the independent Congo and its Prime Minister are decided.

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.

The topic of this essay focusses on analysing human zoo performances in colonial and postcolonial times. It aims to demonstrate that even though the colonial practices of displaying colonized people along with animals and simply advertised as ‘exotic savages’ have disappeared, the staging and the external representation of the ‘Other’ have continued until today. It also looks at the ways in which the history of these ‘freak shows’ is articulated by artists in post-colonial performances and what are the tools used by theater performers/directors in order to re frame the colonial gaze.

In this respect, the political and social climate of reconciliation provides one important context within which to assess recent developments such as the diversification of Aboriginal performance styles (particularly the growth of musical theatre), the increase in plays by/about Aboriginal women, the touring of Aboriginal productions to remote communities as well as interstate and overseas, the re-staging of early Aboriginal works along with the creation of new performance pieces, and the appearance of Aboriginal actors (and less often directors) on most mainstream stages, albeit irregularly. ... While the recent expansion of Aboriginal theatre has not been manifest evenly across time or place, it. does raise a number of important issues which are relevant to the larger performing arts industry in Australia as well as to the specific communities involved. In particular, the current intense interest in Aboriginality raises questions of authority, ownership, and authenticity, especially when performance projects involve intensive collaboration between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal practitioners, as is often the case. Such questions are not merely theoretical but often politically and economically crucial even if there is little consensus about what actually constitutes Aboriginality and how it functions within a settler/migrant society which is becoming increasingly multicultural.

This paper discusses David Malouf's Blood Relations as a post-colonial text that writes back specifically to The Tempest - not as a narrowly parodic work but as one that attempts to problematize the power relationships set up on Shakespeare's mythical New World island and to question their legitimizing discourses.

This essay considers processes by which community identities are challenged by discussing the use of whiteface as an activist strategy in recent indigenous theatre in Canada and Australia. To understand whiteface, I employ Susan Gubar's notion of racechange, processes that test and even transgress racial borders. I also situate whiteface in relation to the history of blackface minstrelsy. Noting the ways these racial performances affirm the hierarchies of color and how power becomes invested in such color codings, the essay highlights indigenous employment of whiteface as a potential form of critical historiography. I then analyze how whiteface functions in two productions, Daniel David Moses's Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991) in Canada and the Queensland Theatre Company's 2000 revival of George Landen Dann's Fountains Beyond in Australia. My analysis posits that such indigenous performances of whiteface can affirm the identity of the marginalized other even as they destabilize the fixity of race and its meanings.

Using Peter Brook’s most recent production, Battlefield (2015), this chapter will examine the soundscape of an intercultural performance in the ways that vocalities, rhythms and accepts that determine a(n) (audial) politics of reception.

Battlefield (2016) is a 70 minute excavation of selected episodes in the final books of the Mahabharata written and directed by Peter Brook. Like Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985) before it, the performance is a renewed attempt at performing universals. Considering the acoustemologies of Battlefield and postulating a politics of listening – to vocalities and rhythms – this chapter will examine Brook’s purported universality as it is heard. The political rhetoric that underscores much of intercultural criticism has been erected on the visual acuity awarded by the mise en scène; the matter of what one listens to is rarely considered In Listening (2007), Jean-Luc Nancy posits how sound is ‘made of referrals … it resounds, that is, it re-emits itself while still actually “sounding,” which is already “re-sounding” since that’s nothing else but referring back to itself.’  The state of referral constructs meaning [le sens] in a reference [renvoi] as a totally. Re-Sounding is, thus, an apt metaphor to consider the relationship between ‘meaning’ and ‘sound’ in Battlefield for both are comprised of a series of referrals. Listening to the sounding voices and vocalities of resonating bodies, and of the rhythms and resonances that compose Battlefield’s soundscape, engenders an aural act/ion that ‘strain[s] toward a possible meaning and consequently one that is not immediately accessible.”

This chapter considers the representation of nature in two recent pieces of ecotheater. Beginning with the nature/culture binary, as well as the debates surrounding it, it asks if all human representations of nonhumans inevitably anthropomorphize, assimilate, or consume what they claim to represent. The essay briefly considers the effectiveness of various forms of ecotheater, like site-specific theater and realism, before focusing on two plays that utilize magical realism to attempt to connect the human and nonhuman world. While critical of universalizing narratives that exclude, minimize, or mistranslate nonhuman agency, this paper nonetheless considers the possibility that humanistic representations of nonhumans might still critique exclusively humanistic theater frameworks. Although the question of how humans can fairly represent a biodiverse world is not necessarily new, this chapter adds new representational strategies and limitations to the ecological conversation.

Australia Now and ventures like it with key trading partner countries make up one prominent strand of cultural activity contributing to the internationalisation of Aboriginal performing arts. Multi-country touring of selected works constitutes another strand, though in practice the two are often linked, not least through government or corporate sponsorship systems. What interests me here are political interventions that Aboriginal people are staging in the diverse international arenas opening up for their work, even as it is harnessed - some would say co-opted - to celebrate the creativity of Australia at large. I want to think about these dynamics in relation to indigenous forms of cultural diplomacy, which, I will argue, involve embodied acts and aesthetic exchanges that sustain minority communities within, against and beyond the fragmentation forces of globalisation. My indicative case examples, among many possibilities, are two works developed in regional Australia and bought to London in 2013: Namatjira and Marrugeku's Gudirr Gudirr.

From Pacific and America Studies - This essay focuses on indigenous festivals in the Pacific in an attempt to draw connections between a dynamic, evolving constellation of cultural events and the conceptual and material labour of nation-building. That instrumental process can be as much about (re)building First Nations communities, sometimes across scattered locales and imposed geo-political borders, as about efforts by sovereign states to fashion a cultural polity. ... What I offer, as a non-indigenous researcher and sometime festivalgoer, is a partial account of the main kinds of cultural and political work indigenous festivals seem to do across broadly similar or interlinked contexts.

Il saggio vuole essere un'introduzione ampia e articolata al teatro dell'autore britannico Hanif Kureishi, riguardo al quale ancora non esiste una trattazione attenta ed esaustiva. A questo scopo, vengono indagate le varie fasi della scrittura drammaturgica dell'autore, compiendo innanzitutto un excursus, e affrontando poi, in una prima parte, la caratterizzazione più politica della fase di esordio (a cavallo tra gli anni Settanta e gli anni Ottanta) e, in una seconda parte, quella più intimistica del ritorno alle scene nei primi anni del terzo millennio. Più specificamente, la sezione dedicata all'impegno politico dell'autore affronta il rapporto con il 'fringe theatre' londinese e analizza a mo' di esempio l'opera Birds of Passage, all'interno della quale, oltre alla questione dei rapporti di classe, di genere e famigliari nel periodo del governo thatcheriano, si ritrovano già enucleati anche i temi dell'immigrazione e della discriminazione razziale: tutti argomenti che saranno molto frequentati dall'autore anche nella successiva produzione cinematografica e letteraria, per la quale egli è sicuramente più conosciuto. La sezione seguente, dedicata alle opere drammatiche scritte dopo circa un quindicennio di interruzione, si concentra in particolare su When the Night Begins, pubblicato qui in traduzione e ancora mai rappresentato in Italia. In esso la virata già sperimentata altrove da Kureishi verso temi più circoscritti e intimistici, come l'amore di coppia o il rapporto tra padri e figli, viene affrontato all'interno di un testo denso, ricco di sfumature e contraddizioni.

Editor. Forthcoming with Bloomsbury 2018.

The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Literature: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates is an essential resource for students and scholars of postcolonial literary studies, asking important questions about the current and future directions of the field.

Postcolonial Texts considers the work of many prominent postcolonial writers, focusing on major writers of the late twentieth and twenty-first century as well as niche and emerging important writers, playwrights, short-story writers, poets, graphic fiction authors, and film-makers, including Leila Aboulela, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Kwame Kwei Armah, Nadeem Aslam, Ibrahim el Batout, Roberto Bolano, Nouri Bouzid, Dionne Brand, David Dabydeen, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Bernardine Evaristo, Amitav Ghosh, Lorna Goodison, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Annemarie Jacir, Jackie Kay, Jamaica Kincaid, Arun Kolatkar, Hari Kunzru, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Naguib Mahfouz, Zakes Mda, Rohinton Mistry, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Emile Ollivier, Michael Ondaatje, Leonardo Padura, Caryl Phillips, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Shan Sa, Kamila Shamsie, Indra Sinha, and Zadie Smith.

Specialists in postcolonial cinema, drama, poetry, graphic fiction and autobiography discuss the ways in which these genres make specific contributions to postcolonial debates. Chapters interrogate the function and impact of postcolonial literature in the context of globalization and neocolonialism. Local and global literary marketplaces and the idea of ‘world’ literature are considered in depth.

Chapters consider postcolonial ecocriticism and disaster; the after-effects of decolonization; postcolonial economics; postcolonialism and the digital humanities; faith and secularism; and sexuality. The book reflects the most recent scholarship in postcolonial studies and engages with current and diverse literatures to ask what postcolonial studies means today.

The turn of this century has witnessed the advent of Asian-Australian Studies as a dynamic and cross-disciplinary field. Previous analytical work relating to Asians in Australia was most often about Asian communities rather than by or with them. Such work concentrated on the sociological and demographic aspects of Asian groups in Australia, while the cultural production of these same groups remained omitted from analyses of Australian art, literature, and performance. "Australian Studies" was by no means neglectful of race, but consideration of Asian-Australian material within this field was mostly limited to historical accounts about representations of Asians by (non-Asian) Australian. Similarly, "Asian Studies", despite undergoing significant disciplinary growth during the 1980s, focused almost exclusively on modes of Asian impact or influence on Australia, or vice versa. This work was cast in terms of specific regional studies and almost always excluded examination of the cultural practices and/or socio-political concerns. of Australians of Asian descent. That both Australian Studies and Asian Studies implicitly placed Asian peoples in Australia outside their theoretical purview ensured that the terms "Asian" and "Australian" continued to signify mutually exclusive categories.

This collection of essays from leading international scholars brings together postcolonial theory, theatre history, textual critique, performance analysis, reflective commentary and dramatic dialogue to give rich insights into drama, theatre and performance in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. (Post)Colonial Stages draws material from different regions of the world - South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Canada, Sri Lanka, India, Ireland, Malaysia and Singapore. Exciting essays on colonial theatre are complemented by studies of contemporary performance practices including pageantry and dance theatre. Also featured are: an interview with Maori playwright, Hone Kouka; script excerpts, including a section from Sistren's Buss Out; incisive commentary on indigenous theatre in settler colonies; minstrelsy; embodiments of race, gender and class; and cutting edge intercultural collaborations. Table of contents and critical introduction attached.

This essay takes as its starting point Jennifer Harvie and Richard Paul Knowles's excellent article on dialogism in Canadian monodrama: "Dialogic Monologue: A Dialogue". Working through Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic text as one which consists of "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses", Harvie and Knowles argue that certain kinds of monodrama produce a dialogic configuration of subjectivity by staging an open-ended play-as in game and performance-in which the speech or accents of multiple voices are inserted into one speaker's utterance (that of the lone actor) without being fully internalised or appropriated. The prime focus of their study is autobiographical monodrama, a specific sub-genre in which subjectivity is dialogised in performance through the very act of publicly constructing a social "self" and thus disclosing the fiction of a pre-existing character. Such texts foreground the fragmentary nature of subjectivity and work against the assumption that there exists an essential and authentic self which is wholly integrated and unchanged through time. Identity is shown to be performative in the sense that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which point to its existence. Hence, there is no "true" or "authentic" self, only multiple "selves" which come into being at the point of articulation in any one situation or event in time. These processual, decentred "selves " can. We are using the term "monodrama" to refer to plays/theatre pieces performed by one actor, occasionally with the assistance of musicians (or a chorus) which do not have substantial speaking parts but rather function as part of the mise en scène. In contradistinction to the dramatic monologue, which can stand alone or constitute part of a multi-actor play, the monodrama is a specific theatrical form defined by its reliance on the solo performer.

This article discusses Black women’s drama and theatre of African and Caribbean lineage against the backdrop of both 1980s identity politics and the emerging Black and Asian theatre scene in Britain. It engages with existing scholarship on Black British theatre and focusses on the work of playwrights and theatre practitioners and in particular on the company Theatre of Black Women (1982-1988), whose work intended to explore “identities, cultures and stories that placed the periphery in the centre – on [their] own terms” (Evaristo 2013). This article argues that Black British women’s theatre played a crucial role in both shaping Black British culture in the 1980s and affirming the presence of Black women on the British theatre scene, while significantly contributing to developing “postcolonial British theatre” (Dahl 1995).

The metaphorizing of the body as a habit of imperialist representation and part of its larger military, medical and pedagogical administration has been both insidious and persuasive throughout Australia's history, but this process always risks recursive dismantlement if those differences which facilitate imperial reductions of the body are also seen to convey an otherness that exceeds textual containment. This paper focuses on representations of the body which traduce the fulsome certainties of imperial history, and I also discuss enactments of verbal language wherever the instrumental trajectories of linguistic and corporeal texts and textures intersect or overlap.

This paper explores Iranian Shakespeare – its history, its utility, and the ways cultural scholars in the West have framed Iranians’ love of the Bard. Within such framing, I trace a recurring trend in which Middle Eastern cultural production is normatively positioned through a lens of politicism and narratives of resistance, an act which I argue merely substantiates the systems of power in which discourse and cultural values are controlled by Western societies, akin to Orientalism. Using Greenblatt’s “Shakespeare in Tehran” as a case study in this style of scholarship, I argue that such thinking stems from dehumanizing philosophies of neoliberalism, which grant subjectivity within conditional limitations. In response, I propose a new methodology for cultural criticism within the Middle East, one that does not impose Western narratives and stereotypes upon groups of people but is instead aware of historical and cultural nuance and attentive to the ways in which performance analysis must be accomplished from within. I then put this methodology into practice with a close reading of three recent versions of Hamlet staged in Tehran, exploring the divergent ways in which these playwrights and directors appropriate the beloved text for Iranian audiences. Ultimately, I argue that Shakespeare, theatre, Western culture, and even censorship play complex and multifaceted roles in Iran, and they do not easily conform to our established narratives in which Shakespeare and Western modes of theatre act subversively to dismantle authoritarian power.

In this essay we attempt to map out a conceptual framework for analyzing a cluster of related practices subsumed under the broad banner of "cross-cultural theatre." For the purposes of our discussion, cross-cultural theatre encompasses resources at the level of narrative content, performance aesthetics, production processes, and/or reception by an interpretive community.

The essays gathered in In Transit focus on issues arising from the historical nexus between travel and imperialism. Contributors investigate the ways in which specific imperial projects were inextricably linked to developments in travel technologies and practices. At the same time, this collection reveals that imperial fantasies of exploration and conquest, whether actualized or not, irrevocably shaped the formulation of travel as a category of modern experience, as a rite/right of passage, and as a type of embodied knowledge. This dynamic, reciprocal relationship between imperialism and travel is examined in relation to written and pictorial documents produced at different historical moments and across a broad range of geographical locations, including India, Borneo, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, Britain, Polynesia, and Papua New Guinea.

From Australian and New Zealand Studies - Like many essential misogynist myths, the story of Medusa provides a powerful focus for counter-discursive feminist re-workings of patriarchal discourse, and there is already a significant swathe of literature and visual art which directly interrogates, subverts and/or appropriates the Gorgon's gaze in order to foreground the particular biases of the constitutive frameworks in which images of the Medusa circulate. What I want to concentrate on here is the importance of this and related myths to two Australian plays, Alma De Groen's The Rivers of China and Sarah Cathcart's The Serpent's Fall (co-written with Andrea Lemon), and beyond these texts to the development of a feminist drama which takes some account of the specificity of Australian culture.

This paper focuses on Michael Gow's 1841, Stephen Sewell's Hate and Louis Nowra's Capricornia. These three plays shared Jack Davis's revisionist vision in Barungin in their determination to reveal that Australian history and much of its attendant mythology is founded on a complex web of lies; Gow and Sewell shift the focus on colonialism's production of a dystopian settler culture while Nowra primarily investigates the development of specific racial identities within such cultures at a particular historical moment. The versions of the past presented by these Bicentennial plays are in themselves important counter-texts which attempt to recuperate marginalised, muted or silenced histories, but as the playwrights under consideration are situated within mainstream Australian theatre, it is perhaps more instructive to focus on some of the contradictions which inhere in dominant histories as well as the meta-discursive features of the plays themselves as dramatic events. This approach involves analysis not only of methods of constructing historical narratives but also of ways of reading them; moreover, it assumes that "stories" designated as artefacts of the Government's Bicentennial largesse will inevitably be marked by sharper than usual critical response and, more crucially, particular critical expectations. Reprinted in Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources, 2021

Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre asserts the centrality of theater to the ongoing negotiations of the Australian context. By exploring ways in which ideas about race, gender, and nation are expressed in concrete theatrical contexts, the performative qualities of theatrical representation are revealed as compelling, important sites of critique. Helen Gilbert discusses an exciting variety of plays, drawing examples from marginalized groups as well as from the theatrical mainstream. While fully engaged with the discourses of contemporary critical thought, Sightlines remains focused on the material stuff of the theater, grounding its discussion in the visual elements of costume, movement, and scenography. And although focused specifically on performance, the author's insistent interest in historical and political contexts also speaks to the broader concerns of cultural studies. The book's recurrent concern with representations of Aboriginality, particularly in the works of nonindigenous playwrights, draws attention to racial politics as a perennial motif in postcolonial nations. Its illumination of the relationships between patriarchy and imperialism is supported by an extensive discussion of plays by and about women. This nomadic approach marks Sightlines as a groundbreaking study of recent Australian theater, a provocative application of postcolonial theory to the embodied qualities of theatrical representation. "An impressive and ground-breaking study that provides a coherent postcolonial approach to Australian drama." --Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales "Elegantly written, and always beautifully lucid in its argument. . . . this is a very original work, particularly in its marriage of performance theory and postcolonial analysis." --Deidre Coleman, University of Sydney

An examination of the performative rather than rhetorical aspects of drama allows us to foreground non-verbal signifiers such as dance as sites of cultural negotiation, and therefore, as potential loci of resistance to hegemonic orders which, in Australia, have been historically constituted within and by imperial and patriarchal discourses. Our current movement towards cultural decolonization involves not just verbal/textual counter-discourse but a counter-discourse of the body and its signifying practices. ... Using a postcolonial perspective as its general framework, this paper confronts issues of power in a discussion of the representation of dance in some contemporary Australian plays by focussing on the subversive possibilities and problematics of the body in a culturally delimited context.

This paper explores Edward Said's concept of Orientalism in regards to literary representations of the racial/sexual Other in Australia and Japan. We are looking at two quite different texts: Confessions of a Mask, an autobiographical novel by Mishima Yukio, and Shimada, a play written by Jill Shearer in the 1980s and subsequently performed to wide acclaim in the eastern states of Australia. We are concerned here not only to interrogate the implicit binarism of Said's model but to consider specificities of geography and history in our analysis.

A general overview of Australian theatre in consideration of some of the critical debates in post-colonial theory. I will outline, briefly, some of their applications to a reading of language, the body and space, all considered key sites of contestation between colonized peoples and imperial powers.

Considering the impact of camera as coloniser; cultural encounter; and colonial violence as percolated through representational practices and image-making, Hartigan discusses how InSalt's conceptualisation of colonisation via the presentness of performance is in conversation with the thematic concerns of the irrevocable impact of genetic engineering as explored in the SEEyD company's first production.

As the article traces the politics and poetics of a deliberately lengthy devising process, Hartigan's journal article is the only sustained critical assessment of the wider dramaturgical _process_ and stakes of the SEEyD company rather than the narrow boundaries of a theatre review focusing on _product_.