ABSTRACT
This paean to imperial patriotism by the patriarch Clive sets the stage for a probing inquiry into the ephemerality and instability of colonial hegemony and its manifestations in bodies, spaces, and time in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. The empire emerges as a sexualized and racialized figment of a masculinist, heterosexist imperial imagination – a figment embodied in the cast of characters populating the family of a prototypical colonial master across two historical times and spaces – colonized Africa and postcolonial England. Churchill mines the history of imperialism not only to forge a critique of the Conservative culture and politics of Thatcherite England, but also to offer a language of anticolonial resistance anchored in a deliberate subversion of gender identities, roles, and expectations. The play’s opening song, with its vision of the imperial “family” as a crypt of power and vehicle of civilization, introduces the audience to signifiers of objectification that expose the coloniality of discourses shaping the identities of gender, race, and sexuality. Illustrating Jean Genet’s claim that there is “a parallel between colonial and sexual oppression,”2
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 simultaneously portrays a system of signification that describes the modernist landscape against which deviance and subjectivity can be imagined by the dominated, and establishes “identity” as a necessary site for asserting democratic citizenship. Empire and its microcosm, the patriarchal family, establish the framework within which various characters challenge their received identities of gender and sexuality as they proceed from the disfranchisement of informal citizenship
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to the empowering claims of non-formal citizenship within the polity of the household.
