ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

part I|90 pages

India

chapter 1|15 pages

When the Subaltern Speaks

Reading Three Plays of Rabindranath Tagore

chapter 2|12 pages

“Where There Is Power, There Is Resistance” 1

Negotiating Resistance and Representation in Dinabandhu Mitra's The Indigo Planting Mirror

chapter 3|12 pages

Budhan Bolta Hai

Social Mobilisation Through Denotified and Nomadic Tribe's Community Theatre

chapter 4|13 pages

Embodying Dalit Resistance

Listen Shefali! and The Scapegoats

chapter 5|12 pages

Touching at Tangents

Narrativity, Representation, and Agency in Saoli Mitra's Five Lords Yet None A Protector

chapter 6|12 pages

Performing Resistance

Revisiting the Myth of Shoorpanakha and Shakuni in Poile Sengupta's Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni

chapter 7|12 pages

The Mimesis of Desire in Mahesh Dattani's Plays

Sexual Politics in Performance

part II|68 pages

North America and the Caribbean

chapter 9|12 pages

A Search for One's Own Place

Forms of Spatiality and Marginalisation in A Raisin in the Sun and Other Dalit Narratives

chapter 10|16 pages

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

chapter 11|13 pages

The Body Is a (New Materialist) State Apparatus

Agency and the Industrial Body in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly

chapter 12|15 pages

Fall and Redemption

Colonial Marginalisation and Postcolonial Resistance in Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain

part III|52 pages

Africa

chapter 13|12 pages

“I am One of Your Children”

Discordance and Transformation in Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa!

chapter 14|11 pages

The Idea of the Margin and Its Vigorous Problematisation

A Discursive Study of Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests

chapter 15|14 pages

Power Through Performance

A Study of Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel

chapter 16|13 pages

Retelling Myth/Reconfiguring Subalternity

Gender Politics and History in Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa

part IV|30 pages

Australia

chapter 18|13 pages

Appropriating the Margin

Theatre and Aboriginality in Jack Davis's the First Born Trilogy