ABSTRACT
Unlike fiction and poetry, transnational theater is complicated by the fact that plays exist as both texts and in performance. Each performance is to some degree a translation or interpretation of the play in its textual form, and plays travel the globe in the form both of texts and performances. Indeed, the theater where Shakespeare’s plays were initially performed was called The Globe Theater. The extensive global development of both African and South Asian diasporas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has also served to spread more modern forms of theater and musical drama from both continents—influenced by the West—around the world. Given the transnational turn in theater and drama studies in recent decades, it should not be surprising that the field has come to focus in particular on theater as what J. Ellen Gainor has called “a site for the representation of, but also the resistance to, imperialism”.
