ABSTRACT
In this essay, Michael Picardie begins by setting up a framework for application of theoretical ideas to theatre work, drawing on discourse analysis, deconstruction, and feminist analysis of the place of self and ‘other’ in life and in writing. He argues that this is one way to situate an approach to South African playwrights today. He then takes a critical look at the work of two playwrights: Gcina Mhlophe and Fatima Dike. He applies his theoretical perspective to their work, and argues that the representation of the personal, in the context of these two black South African writers, can be deconstructed with regard to issues of ethnography, power politics, literary politics, and the politics of performance. Picardie takes a very critical view of Mhlophe's work; his theoretical paradigm finds her work wanting. Of course, a different paradigm would find different things to value. Readers may want to read the plays discussed and make up their own minds about the relative value of these and other South African women's writings.
Now, ethnology—like any science—comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them. Consequently, whether he wants to or not, and this does not depend on a decision on his part – the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism the very moment when he denounces them. This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contigency. We ought to consider all its implications very carefully. But if no one can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little he may do so, this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of equal pertinence. The quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigour with which this relation to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. […] It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.
—Jacques Derrida (1978, 282)
