1st Edition
Theatre, Margins and Politics An Introduction
This book interrogates the relationship of theatre and the dialectics of centre and the margins. It looks into the exciting world of performance to examine how theatre as an art form is perfectly placed to both perform and critique complex relations of power, politics, and culture.
The volume looks into how drama has historically served as a stage for expressing and showcasing prevalent social, historical, and cultural contexts from which it has emerged or intends to critique. Including a wide range of performative practices like Dalit Theatre, Australian Aboriginal theatre, Western realism, and Yoruba theatre, it explores varied lived experiences of people, and voices of subversion, subalternity, resistance, and transformation. The book scrutinises the strategies of representation enunciated through textuality, theatricality, and performance in these works and the politics they are inextricably linked with.
This book will be of interest and use to scholars, researchers, and students of theatre and performance studies, postcolonial studies, race and inequality studies, gender studies, and culture studies.
Notes on the Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I
India
1 When the Subaltern Speaks: Reading Three Plays of Rabindranath Tagore
SANJUKTA DASGUPTA
2 “Where There Is Power, There Is Resistance”: Negotiating Resistance and Representation in Dinabandhu Mitra’s The Indigo Planting Mirror
INDRAJIT MUKHERJEE
3 Budhan Bolta Hai: Social Mobilisation Through Denotified and Nomadic Tribe’s Community Theatre
ANITA SINGH
4 Embodying Dalit Resistance: Listen Shefali! and The Scapegoats
APARNA SINGH
5 Touching at Tangents: Narrativity, Representation, and Agency in Saoli Mitra’s Five Lords Yet None A Protector
AVERI SAHA
6 Performing Resistance: Revisiting the Myth of Shoorpanakha and Shakuni in Poile Sengupta’s Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni
MONAMI NAG
7 The Mimesis of Desire in Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Sexual Politics in Performance
PARTHA SARATHI GUPTA
II
North America and the Caribbean
8 Cultural Resurgence and the Trickster in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters
B. POOVILANGOTHAI
9 A Search for One’s Own Place: Forms of Spatiality and Marginalisation in A Raisin in the Sun and Other Dalit Narratives
RAJA BASU
10 Black Skin, Female Body: Oppression, Pathology of Suicide, and Subversive Recovery of Self in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf
ARNAB RAY
11 The Body Is a (New Materialist) State Apparatus: Agency and the Industrial Body in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly
SUBASHISH BHATTACHARJEE
12 Fall and Redemption: Colonial Marginalisation and Postcolonial Resistance in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain
ARNAB RAY
III
Africa
13 “I am One of Your Children”: Discordance and Transformation in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!
SRIRUPA MAHALANABIS
14 The Idea of the Margin and Its Vigorous Problematisation: A Discursive Study of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests
SARANYA MUKHERJEE
15 Power Through Performance: A Study of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel
SHARADA CHIGURUPATI
16 Retelling Myth/Reconfiguring Subalternity: Gender Politics and History in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa
SUDIPTA CHAKRABORTY
IV
Australia
17 The Performative Politics of Reconciliation in David Milroy’s Waltzing the Wilarra
MICHAEL R. GRIFFITHS
18 Appropriating the Margin: Theatre and Aboriginality in Jack Davis’s the First Born Trilogy
SIBENDU CHAKRABORTY
Index
Biography
Arnab Ray is Associate Professor of English at Rabin Mukherjee College, affiliated with the University of Calcutta, India.
Sibendu Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of English at Charuchandra College, affiliated with the University of Calcutta, India.
