ABSTRACT
The leader of a rebellion against colonial forces or someone generally historicised as villainous is often reconstructed in post-colonial theatre to play a highly prominent role in the struggle for freedom from imperial rule. A number of post-colonial plays provide contexts for the specific refiguring of gender roles/identities and the articulation of a multiplicity of feminisms within restructured histories. Aside from the basic reviewing of a fragment of history when new 'facts' come to light, post-colonial histories attempt to tell the other sides of a story and to accommodate not only the key events experienced by a community but also the cultural context through which these events are interpreted and recorded. The chapter assesses ways in which history is re-evaluated and redeployed in post-colonial drama. It focuses on how plays and playwrights construct discursive contexts for an artistic, social, and political present by enacting other versions of the pre-contact, imperial, and postimperial past on stage.
