ABSTRACT
This chapter puts forward autoethnographic reflexivity as a useful tool to untangle the complexities and affective nuances of audience experience. Just as Norman Denzin describes the incursion of autoethnography as method in sociology, the analysis of Huff required help from autoethnographic methods once realized how much the viewing self was implicated in the reception of the performance. The Indigenous thinkers helped to develop a reading of Huff that examines how Cardinal’s/Wind’s return gaze, through the specifics of his address and the play’s dramaturgical structure, demonstrates through the bodies of individual settler-spectators that the gaze is itself an action that holds potential to harm and makes readers complicit with the oppression of Indigenous peoples. The chapter reveals the Western theatrical gaze’s colonizing impulse and demonstrates how the stage with its proscenium dynamics acts as a microcosm of the dynamics of the gaze in the larger colonial state.
