Theatre, Margins and Politics

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.

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.

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