Theatre After Empire 1138368954, 9781138368958

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THEATRE AFTER EMPIRE

Emphasizing the resilience of theatre arts in the midst of signifcant political change, Theatre After Empire spotlights the emergence of new performance styles in the wake of collapsed political systems. Centering on theatrical works from the late nineteenth century to the present, twelve original essays written by prominent theatre scholars showcase the development of new work after social revolutions, independence campaigns, the overthrow of monarchies, and world wars. Global in scope, this book features performances occurring across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays attend to a range of live events—theatre, dance, and performance art—that stage subaltern experiences and reveal societies in the midst of cultural, political, and geographic transition. This collection is an engaging resource for students and scholars of theatre and performance; world history; and those interested in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. Megan E. Geigner is an assistant professor of instruction in the Cook Family Writing Program at Northwestern University. She researches the performance of racial, ethnic, and national identity. She is co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance. Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. His books include Embodying Black Experience and Performance in the Borderlands.

THEATRE AFTER EMPIRE

Edited by Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-36894-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-36895-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42894-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young

vii ix xi 1

1 Dr. See-Through and His Kin: East African Theatre in the Interregnum Joshua Williams

15

2 Between Empire and Dictatorship: The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis Katherine A. Zien

30

3 Absurdist Theatre Goes Postcolonial: Trans-Contextuality, Absurd Jokes, and Evocation in (Post)colonial Plays Mina Kyounghye Kwon

49

4 History Plays: Performing the Anti-Apartheid Movement on Contemporary South African Stages Gibson Alessandro Cima

68

5 Brendan Behan’s Depictions of Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Failure Eleanor Owicki and Megan E. Geigner

85

vi

Contents

6 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Development of Western Turkish Theatre and the Pursuit of Identity Elif Bas¸

103

7 Toward a New African Personality: The National Theatre Movement of Ghana from Nkrumah to Rawlings David Afriyie Donkor

118

8 Rediscovering Tradition in Modern Asian Theatre Siyuan Liu 9 The Empire Lingers: Staging Zainichi Korean Lived Experiences in Contemporary Japan Jessica Nakamura 10 Toward a Third Performance: Dance, Exile, and AntiImperialism in Fernando Solanas’s Tangos: El exilio de Gardel Victoria Fortuna 11 Bollywood Afects: Feeling Brown with Meena Kumari Kareem Khubchandani

133

148

162 177

12 Sounding Asian American: Geeks and Superheroes in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone Esther Kim Lee

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Index

207

ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1 Map of the Panama Canal Area, showing lands reverted by the Torrijos-Carter Treaties 5.1 The Hostage at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, 1959 7.1 National Theatre (Ghana) 10.1 Exilio de Gardel: Tangos (1985) 11.1 Rifco Theatre Company’s Miss Meena and the Masala Queens with Raj Ghatak as Miss Meena and Harvey Dhadda as Meena Kumari 12.1 James Ryen (Quang) and Will Dao (Nhan) in Vietgone at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2017

34 96 128 164

181 195

CONTRIBUTORS

Elif Bas¸ is an assistant professor at Bahçeşehir University Conservatory in Istan-

bul. She completed her MA at the University of Essex and received her PhD in Dramatic Criticism and Dramaturgy from Istanbul University. She has worked as a director, dramaturg, and translator for over ten years. Her scholarly interests include political theatre, minority theatre, and Turkish theatre. Gibson Alessandro Cima  is an assistant professor of theatre history and head

of the Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Studies Program in Northern Illinois University’s School of Theatre and Dance. His essays on South African theatre and performance have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and South African Theatre Journal. David Afriyie Donkor  is associate professor of performance studies and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station. He is the author of the book Spiders of the Market: Ghanaian Trickster Performance in a Web of Neoliberalism as well as articles in Theatre Survey, Theatre History Studies, TDR, and Cultural Studies, among others. Victoria Fortuna  is assistant professor of dance at Reed College. Her book,

Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires, examines the relationship between Buenos Aires-based contemporary dance practices and histories of political and economic violence in Argentina from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. Megan E. Geigner  is an assistant professor of instruction in the Cook Family

Writing Program at Northwestern University. She researches the performance of racial, ethnic, and national identity. She is co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance.

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Contributors

Esther Kim Lee is professor of theatre studies at Duke University. She authored A History of Asian American Theatre and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang, and edited Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas. Siyuan Liu is associate professor of theatre at the University of British Columbia and editor of Asian Theatre Journal. Major publications include Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theatre in the 1950s and Early 1960s, Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre, and Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. Kareem Khubchandani  is the Mellon Bridge assistant professor in theatre,

dance, and performance studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife and co-editor of Queer Nightlife. Mina Kyounghye Kwon  is associate professor of world and comparative liter-

ature at the University of North Georgia. She has published essays on Korean theatre, Asian American drama, and modern drama. She is co-editor of three world literature anthologies and has translated Korean traditional puppet plays into English. Jessica Nakamura  is an associate professor in the Department of Theater and

Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research project explores representations of the domestic in twentieth-century Japanese theatre, from the introduction of Western realism to the present. Eleanor Owicki  is an assistant professor in Indiana University’s Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. She has published articles in Theatre Symposium and The New Hibernia Review as well as chapters in several edited collections. Her current research focuses on theatre in post-confict Northern Ireland. Joshua Williams  has published widely on race, animality, and politics in East African theatre and performance from the colonial period onward. He is currently translating the complete plays of the Tanzanian dramatist Ebrahim Hussein from Swahili into English—and his own plays have been developed and produced at theatres across the United States. He teaches at Brandeis University. Harvey Young  is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. He

is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; a former editor of Theatre Survey; and author/editor of nine books, including Performance in the Borderlands. Katherine A. Zien  is associate professor at McGill University. Zien teaches and researches performance in the Americas. She is the author of Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone. Zien’s current research project examines theatre and militarization during Latin America’s Cold War.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The original outline for this book was sketched out on the back of a napkin in the lobby of the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago during the 2016 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) annual conference. The conference, which was chaired by Kelly Howe, ofered innumerable opportunities to consider aspects of theatrical labor. In her welcome message to attendees, Howe asked, “How does the analytic frame of performance help us better understand past and present labor atrocities that have shaped our current national and international economic systems (slavery, human trafcking, exploitation of undocumented workers, etc.)?” Against this backdrop, we discussed a range of topics before landing on empires, which often are built upon such atrocities. We identifed shared scholarly interests: those moments when empires and regimes begin to crumble as well as the aftermath of their collapse. Seeking to host a conversation that would exceed the limits of postcolonial theatre, we decided to embark on this journey. We greatly appreciate the assistance and advocacy of the team at Routledge. Ben Piggott provided helpful guidance on this project as it developed from a sketch to a formal proposal. His enthusiasm for and immediate embrace of Theatre After Empire helped to launch this book. Laura Soppelsa provided timely assistance on contracts. Zoë Forbes kept this project moving. Aswini Kumar steered it through the publication process. A lot can happen in fve years. We both changed institutions: Megan going from the US Naval Academy to Northwestern University and Harvey moving from Northwestern University to Boston University. We are thankful to the following friends and colleagues who have bolstered our spirits over the years: Josh Abrams, Jessica Hinds-Bond, Stacy McKenna, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Dassia Posner, Liz Son, Patricia Nguyen, Sally Nuamah, Jennifer Weintritt, and Elizabeth Lenaghan. In addition, we thank the extraordinary contributors to

xii Acknowledgments

this collection: Elif, Gibson, David, Victoria, Eleanor, Esther, Siyuan, Kareem, Jessica, Mina Kyounghye, Josh, and Katie. They are amazing—smart and kind— collaborators, whose commitment to this project even in the midst of a global pandemic (COVID-19) is a testament to their extraordinary character. Lots of love to Cora, Zeke, Heather, Joel, Judy, Logan, Kelly, Balian, and Wrigley.

INTRODUCTION Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young

In the weeks preceding the opening of Hamilton in London, Lin-Manuel Miranda publicly fretted about how his award-winning musical would be received. He wondered whether West End audiences would be interested in an ostensibly American story. Whereas the mythology of George Washington and Thomas Jeferson loom large in the United States—and the duel-to-the-death of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton often captivate US schoolchildren— Miranda understood that these historical fgures might be less familiar and, more worrisome, less interesting to theatre-goers in the United Kingdom. What especially concerned him was how audiences, who continued to revere the British monarchy, would respond to the portrayal of George III, the British king under whose reign the American colonies won independence. George III in Hamilton, as The Guardian reports, “is a fgure of inefable absurdity.”1 Miranda’s anxiety was unfounded. Audiences were dazzled by his fusion of rap and R&B music in a multicultural retelling of an episode of US history. They laughed and sang (and rapped) along as they watched a musical that called attention to the after empire status of their nation. This collection places an emphasis on a range of theatrical performances that emerged in the wake of collapsed imperial regimes. Unlike Miranda’s musical, which was created centuries after the American War of Independence (or the Revolutionary War, as it is called in the United States), the performances featured in this book were created either in the midst of or in the decades following their decline. A focus on theatre after empire ofers an opportunity to appreciate the imbrication of art and politics in periods of uncertainty, when ideas of nation, the inheritance of culture, and the imaginings of the future were contested.

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“After” Not “Post” We ofer the concept after empire to account for the shifting political, cultural, and geographical zones that emerge as dominating regimes collapse and ideas of independence assert themselves. Whereas theories of colonialism and postcolonialism anchor themselves in specifc historical moments—the arrival of non-indigenous settlers (even within already inhabited territories) or the signing of agreements to mark a region as a colony, territory, or commonwealth—after empire reminds us of the ways that systems of power do not upend in the blink of an eye. In East Africa, as Joshua Williams asserts in this collection, uhuru (“freedom” in Swahili) from the United Kingdom did not mark an end to imperialism in Kenya, Uganda, and (what became) Tanzania but rather seemed to suspend time itself as a decolonial transition took place. Or, as Jessica Nakamura observes in the pages that follow, Korean migrants permanently residing in Japan could not unfasten the yoke of Japanese imperialism despite no longer being colonial subjects after World War II. After empire enables a more fulsome appreciation of the feeling, the “justifed unease” as Tejumola Olanuyan terms it, resulting from an acknowledgment that colonialism can continue within allegedly postcolonial settings. It is our belief that after empire helpfully revises the binary framework that often exists within popular conceptions of postcoloniality: center-periphery, metropole-colony, colonizing nation-colonized people. These pairings have resulted in rich analyses and provided compelling and efective ways of interrogating a range of similar experiences across national settings. However, they do not account for the full sweep of empire. Alongside more traditional colonial arrangements, there are other regions that have been subjected to external domineering infuence despite formally never having been colonized. As Katherine A. Zien points out in this book, the United States occupied part of Panama (the Canal Zone) beginning in 1903, but never “colonized” it. And yet, even when the last US soldiers left the country, and the United States handed over the Canal Zone in 1999, a “colonial logic” endured. The expansiveness of after empire as a critical framework renders visible operations that otherwise would have been overlooked (or would be easier to overlook) from a purely colonial perspective. Furthermore, it allows for transnational, transglobal, and, what Mina Kyounghye Kwon calls, “transcontextual” analyses. In addition to addressing the unidirectional or bidirectional movement of culture, after empire encompasses a multidirectional fow. It is sufciently capacious, as this book demonstrates, to include South Korean playwrights embracing Theatre of the Absurd style as a means to address the aftermath of Japanese imperialism; American authors who write about the experience of Vietnamese refugees in the United States, which also imagines a pre-migration, pre-refugee presence informed by French occupation; and the revitalization of Indonesian puppet theatre after the exit of missionaries, traders, and colonizers from Europe and Asia who inhabited the archipelago for centuries. We have included original essays that spotlight the circulation of big ideas, often sufciently generous to exceed the binary formations

Introduction

3

present in postcolonial literature. In this confguration, empire is not just an issue of territory and the people occupied or occupying that territory, but instead a more inclusive idea that embraces a larger set of diverse global experiences. While scholarship on postcolonial theatre and performance focuses on recovering or making new identities, lands, and nations when a ruling force leaves, postcoloniality as a conceptual category does not apply smoothly to all peoples who experienced empire. As American Indigenous Studies scholar Jodi A. Byrd points out, For those within American Indian and indigenous studies, postcolonial theory has been especially verboten precisely because the ‘post-,’ even though its contradictory temporal meanings are often debated, represents a condition of futurity that has not yet been achieved as the United States continues to colonize and occupy indigenous homelands.2 Furthermore, while postcolonial theory provides useful analysis for discussions of sovereignty, power, and indigeneity, Eric Cheyftz observes that the feld tends to eclipse the experience of those peoples outside former European nation-states and their former colonies.3 What is to be done with groups of people who are no longer experiencing a colonial occupation from a pre- World War II empire but continue to live under deep settler or arrivant colonialism?4 Within this same lexicon of postcolonialism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has interrogated the idea of “liberal multiculturalism” arising from the misunderstandings of postcolonial thought, emphasizing that an idea of many cultures living side by side in the former metropole is strikingly diferent between London and New York, and that failing to specify which type of multicultural one is speaking about fattens any insight.5 In addition to making room for multiple multiculturalisms and the successes and failures of them, this collection also allows for conversation across ideas of postcolonialism and diaspora. While postcolonialism and diaspora studies come together around notions of identity-making, both generally tie back to a time and place wherein the territory was precolonial and indigenous people had not yet been forced to scatter. The vocabulary of homeland and hostland does not neatly apply to a pre-Mao and post-Mao China or to Turkey’s experience preand post-Ottoman Empire. Hence, our idea of after empire allows the contributors in this volume to make arguments about the nature of the art made by peoples for whom the idea of “homeland” still resonates and to do so while also in conversation about the art made by peoples who have long occupied their “home.” Similarly, much of postcolonialism ofers rich frameworks for understanding race and racialization within European nation-state colonization of the Global South models, but limits the fuid way non-territorially based ideas of power afect race when the ruling and ruled do not hail from disparate global locations. As George Lipsitz makes clear, “relations between races are relations between places,”6 but plenty of purveyors and subjects of empires did not employ racialization as a

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tactic. In the case of the former Soviet Union, for example, Russian leaders used rhetoric of pan-Slavic brotherhood as a means to wield power and obligation from the client states behind the Iron Curtain. Additionally, former colonial powers now (seemingly) celebrate diverse racial populations through rhetoric of asylum and liberal democracy with consensual citizenship. All of this is to say that imperialism and postcolonialism as schemas rely on marked territory, clear nation-states, racial diferentiation, and dichotomies of ruler and ruled. By creating a framework of after empire, we release some of this rigidity to look at the similarities and diferences between those who have experienced diferent types of empire in a way that embraces the theatre and performance practices of those still displaced by (deep) settler colonialism, those not racialized, as well as those not directly subject to the power of another nation but who are nevertheless engaged in economic, military, or cultural relationships with outside powers in an unbalanced way. This allows for a sidestepping of what Lisa Lowe calls “a brute binary division,” to instead allow for multiple considerations of time, space, and power across histories of “indigeneity, slavery, industry, trade, and immigration” and how that afects theatre and performance.7 While the focus on imperialism in explaining much of modern theatre history has provided useful criteria to analyze the relationship of the arts with politics and oppression, this collection of essays explicates lacunae in conceptions of theatre when viewed as nationalist, independence, colonialist, and/or postcolonialist expression. Certainly twentieth- and twenty-frst-century theatre and performance remain in relation to the state and to politics while no longer being best described by any of these monikers. By introducing the category of after empire theatre, these essays provide a framework for relationships between performance and government that trouble the paradigm of support versus resistance, metropole versus colony, and national versus global. Furthermore, it allows scholarship to speak across dissimilar political situations to instances of related theatre-making. Finally, these essays depict how citizen-subjects embody post-empire politics by migrating elsewhere and/or shifting their national or imperial identities in performance.

Bracketing Empire Empires, by defnition, exceed the limits of national borders. They encompass large portions of continents. They cross oceans. Indeed, they can be sufciently expansive—as the saying goes—that it seems like the sun may never set on them. Books, in contrast, are constrained. There is a start and an end; a title page and an index. Unfortunately, it is not possible to engage with every instance of empire within a single book (or, at least, within one that you might want to carry with you). There simply are too many compelling potential case studies. In this collection, we present a selection of performance after-efects of empire around the world with the aim of revealing how theatre and dance have refected and responded to changed political and socioeconomic circumstances in parts of

Introduction

5

Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Although their signifcance cannot be overstated, we have elected not to center the British, French, and Russian empires. The link between empire and theatre in a manner that centers western Europe has benefted from extensive scholarly engagement. In Theatre & Empire, Benjamin Poore “concentrate[s] primarily on Anglophone theatre produced or performed in the UK” to introduce his reader to a range of plays and performances from the display of people in “human zoos” in London to the tours of English productions, such as Henry Irving’s Lyceum Company to Canada in the early nineteenth century, to more contemporary works, such as Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Statement of Regret and Jimmy McGovern’s King Cotton, which look back upon England’s engagement in and, later, abolishment of, the transatlantic slave trade. Poore asserts—and we agree—that “theatre is one of the few places where sustained refection is possible on what an empire is.”8 He adds, Empires cannot be seen in their totality. What theatre does is to pick our moments, situations, individuals, props; tiny parts that stand in for the whole. Through this synecdoche, theatre lends abstract concepts like conquest, liberty and subjugation a temporary solidity for the duration of the performance.9 Tristan Marshall, in Theatre and Empire, looks back to the early seventeenth century to trace the development of the concept of empire alongside the emergence of Great Britain. Marshall highlights two facets of empire, imperium and empire, which structured early ways of thinking about the nation-state in the world. The former (imperium) was primarily internal, emphasizing how Great Britain sought to be a “kingdom free of outside infuence or interference.”10 Rather than seeking to expand borders, this perspective strived to maintain independence and self-rule against external infuence. For example, imperium ofered a way to conceive of early England as a nation-state desiring insulation against attack (by the Scots among others) and religious doctrine (by the Pope). In time, as Great Britain expanded, dominated and claimed territories around the world, the concept of empire, with its assumption of a colonizing impulse, began to take hold and gain traction.11 The expanse of the British Empire was considerable. Claire Cochran, in Twentieth-Century British Theatre, writes, “[it] occupied one-ffth of the land surface area of the globe and had a population of 400 million, 300 million of which lived in India.”12 Its size was sufcient to touch every inhabited continent. It is difcult to write about theatre both past and present in Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia among other places without acknowledging the cultural inheritance of English theatre. However, the fow of culture was not unidirectional. Even as the writings of William Shakespeare among others traveled to British colonies and territories, the styles of other places were imported back to the imperial metropole. The result was a blending—which, at

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best, demonstrates the powerful mosaic of infuences that can emerge through empire and, at worst, could catalyze a biased, nationalist fervor increasingly threatened by multiculturism. Today, it can be difcult to appreciate the scale and signifcance of the French Empire. Despite being overshadowed by the largesse of Great Britain, France managed colonies and outposts around the world, from Haiti to Tahiti to Indochina. At its peak, it also asserted infuence over signifcant portions of Europe: “from Hamburg in the north to Rome in the south [… with] a population of 44 million.”13 Unlike Great Britain, the French empire was remarkably elastic as a result of shifting political ideologies in the country (such as the rise and fall of monarchist and republican sentiments) as well as the independence campaigns of colonial outposts. In Narratives of the French Empire, Kate Marsh notes, “There was no single monolithic French colonial project; over the course of four centuries, the French colonial ‘empire’ expanded and contracted to encompass territories across fve continents at various times.”14 Often in fux, the French Empire did not create the narratives of power the British Empire did, and, in fact, select independence campaigns within it, particularly Haiti, chipped away at its grandeur. Marsh writes, “the revolutionary overthrow of French imperial rule by slaves was an embarrassment that lent itself to national amnesia….the ‘unthinkable’ event was either written out of French history (notably the historiography of the French Revolution) or its signifcance was diminished.”15 Despite its lack of narrative staying power, the French Empire proved signifcant in its enhancement and circulation of art and culture. In Building the French Empire, Benjamin Steiner places a spotlight on the creative people who lived and worked at the center of French colonial outposts. He draws attention to “the builders of empire at the construction site itself: the engineers, artisans, experts, workers, and slaves—all those builders who were responsible for the establishment of material constructs that formed the backbone of the modern French empire.”16 In so doing, he makes a persuasive case that the French Empire was fundamentally an empire of culture which was never unidirectional (empire to colony) but comprised of myriad interconnected circuits. Evidence of this infuence appears in, as Marsh observes, “[t]he emergent political, literary and philosophical resistance to the psychological efects of colonialism on the colonized saw the establishment of a black Antillean literary tradition, not least in the form of negritude in the mid-twentieth century.”17 Although Russian contributions to theatre history are most frequently summarized by the late nineteenth-century innovations of Konstantin Stanislavski and the international tours of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), a recent wave of scholarship has emerged to discuss the theatre created a century after the MAT and following the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991. Jessica Hinds-Bond, in her study of contemporary Russian theatre, writes, “The era of Perestroika (1985–1991) and the fall of the Soviet Union (1991) was marked in the Russian theatre by a turn from the grand theatrical institutions of the Soviet era to smaller, often-short-lived studio theatres” (18–19). Within

Introduction

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studios, a new generation of playwrights revisited literary classics and, unfettered by government censorship, began to explore contemporary Russian identity. Hinds-Bond notes, “Russia’s literary canon, freed from its Soviet-approved interpretations, has provided rich material for this generation of playwrights and theatre practitioners in their quest to represent and interrogate life in their new country” (14). This new studio approach “quickly died out” after only a handful of years. However, a new drama movement would continue for a few additional years before being shortened by a return of overt government oversight. Julia Secklehner, ofering an overview of “some of the most important Russian speaking drama of the last 25 years,” highlights Olga Mukhina’s Tanya Tanya, Natalia Vorozhbyt’s Tomorrow, Yaroslava Pulinovich’s Somnambulism, and Pavel Pryazhko’s The Locked Door as prominent examples of Russian theatre during this period. However, the political rise of Vladimir Putin in Russia led to a re-embrace of earlier authoritarianism which, ultimately, proved unfriendly to the performing arts. Joshua Yafa notes, in a 2020 Guardian article, that a political shift began in 2011 which “blended conservative values, anti-western resentment, disdain for urban elites and an elevation of the Orthodox church” and ultimately “heralded the end of the state’s enthusiasm for experimental and avant-garde artforms.”18 There are additional regions with after empire innovations that are not featured in this book. Australia may be the most prominent example with its fraternal tensions of colonialism: white Australian antagonisms with both white Britishness and Aboriginal history. Concerning the latter, Helen Gilbert writes, “The 1988 bicentennial celebration of European settlement (invasion) put Aboriginal issues on Australia’s theatre agenda in an unprecedented way.”19 Refecting on the emergent theatre of the 1990s, Veronica Kelly notes that the decade “[saw] a partial dissolving of the central theatrical narrative of ‘national identity’ and its simultaneous reinscription as indigenous, regional and new ethnic and gay voices continue to erode distinctions between ‘mainstream’ and alternative repertoire.”20 In decentering frequently and well-studied regions in favor of others which comparatively have received less scholarly attention, our aim is to expand the conversation on the infuence and efects of empire on theatre and performance. Simply put, there are more scholarly considerations of British, French, Russian, and even Australian theatre than of Uganda, Panama, and South Korea among others. By bracketing select well-known regions, we create space for other experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and empire.

A Short History of Empire To understand the way people who are featured in this collection have dealt with theatre and performance after empire, some cursory understanding of the timelines, territories, and geopolitics of the major global empires is helpful. The modern era of empire as a world-organizing principle began in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.21

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The Mongol Empire, one of the world’s largest empires, began in what is now Mongolia and Central China in the early 1200s, and, by the turn of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, stretched from the Sea of Japan to the eastern Mediterranean Sea. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Jolof Empire gained the rule of a large swath of western Africa. European imperialism began near the same time; Portugal gained control of the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula and began exploring the west coast of Africa and set up a trading post in Morocco. As the Mongol Empire receded in the early fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire began in western Turkey. Between 1300 and the late 1600s, the Ottoman Empire controlled all of the African coast of the Mediterranean (except Morocco), most of the Balkan Peninsula, the Levant, a signifcant portion of the Arabian Peninsula, the Red Sea, all of what is modern Turkey, all the land around the Black Sea, parts of Iraq and Iran, and portions of eastern and central Europe. The Russian Empire began expansion in the 1300s by claiming the areas east of Russia in north central Asia. With the rise of the Romanovs at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth century, Russia moved further east to claim Siberia, expanding Russia to the Pacifc Ocean. By the early nineteenth century, Russia had claimed most of Central Asia (including modern-day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), part of China, countries in Europe (including modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland), and Alaska in North America. Just after and contemporary to these developments, the European Age of Discovery—100 years between the mid-ffteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries when European ships traversed the globe “discovering” and claiming parts of the Americans, Africa, and Asia—began. By the mid-ffteenth century, Portugal had trading posts, feitorias, on ports on both the west and east coasts of Africa, in India, Indonesia, and China. They claimed ownership over Brazil. Spain and Portugal became the Iberian Union of Spain and Portugal between 1580 and 1640. Spain had already colonized parts of Italy, the Marshall Islands in the South Pacifc, most of what is now Central America and the Caribbean, the western coast of South America, and most of Mexico by this time. Not to be outdone by the Iberians, France, the Netherlands, and England (later Great Britain) colonized parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa in the same period. The British Empire began with plantations on the island of Ireland in the early sixteenth century, and expanded to North America and the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century. Also in the early seventeenth century, England and the Netherlands created the East India and Dutch East India Companies, joint-stock companies, to help fund their colonial interests and fght the French, Portuguese, and Spanish empires. In the same period, France colonized parts of North America, South America, the west coast of Africa, and islands in the South Pacifc. France increased its holdings to include parts of northern Africa; Madagascar; and parts of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam.

Introduction

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By 1750, England had overpowered Scotland to become Great Britain, and the British Empire controlled much of South Asia (including modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (including modern-day Malaysia, part of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand), Hong Kong, parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Mediterranean (including modern-day Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, and Israel), many countries in Africa (including modern-day Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gambia), small holdings in South America (including Guyana, Honduras, and the Falkland Islands), much of the Caribbean (including Bermuda and the Bahamas), and huge swaths of North America (including the east coast of the United States and all of Canada). In the late nineteenth century, when this collection begins, Japan and the United States had also developed empires. Japan claimed the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan near the end of the nineteenth century. By World War II, Japan also claimed the Mariana Islands and portions of eastern China. Embracing ideas of manifest destiny and calls to “Go West,” the United States expanded from the east coast of central North America to the Pacifc Ocean after making treaties with the French, Spanish, and indigenous people of North America throughout the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States also gained Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. By the 1950s, it had also taken possession of Hawaii and Alaska. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of the world was caught between two dueling empires—the United States and the Soviet Union—waging a Cold War. This period (through the present day) is defned by the rise of dictatorships and theocratic movements as well as resistance to them. After World War II, European countries formed alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact). The Cold War played out in Asia in China, Korea, and Vietnam with battles and military overthrows. The United States, fearing the rise of communist countries, engaged in wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the period left Southeast Asia unstable. These incidents led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during and after the Vietnam War, the partitioning of Korea, and the dictatorship in Myanmar (Burma). Perhaps the region most afected was Latin America where a number of dictators took power including in Argentina ( Jorge Rafael Videla), Bolivia (Hugo Banzer), Brazil ( João Figueiredo), the Dominican Republic (Rafael Trujillo), Chile (Augusto Pinochet), Cuba (Fidel Castro), Colombia (Gustavo Rojas Pinilla), Ecuador (Guillermo Rodríguez Lara), Guatemala (Carlos Castillo Armas), Haiti ( Jean-Claude Duvalier), Nicaragua (Anastasio Somoza Debayle), and Panama (Manuel Noriega). The Middle East and Africa were not immune to this wave of dictators; many countries became (theocratic) dictatorships including Iran (Ruhollah Khomeini) and Iraq (Saddam Hussein), Libya (Muammar al-Gaddaf), Egypt (Hosni Mubarak), Syria (Hafez al-Assad), and Uganda (Idi Amin). It is with this backdrop that our chapters unfold.

10 Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young

Chapter Overview The collection begins with Joshua Williams’s analysis of a series of plays written in the 1960s and 1970s in post-independence East Africa. Williams argues that once Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania had uhuru (freedom), the nations began a morbid interregnum, a time wherein “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” As such, the plays of Peter Nazareth, Mĩcere Mũgo, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ebrahim Hussein, Francis Imbuga, John Ruganda, and Robert Serumaga demonstrate woundedness and monstrosity to survey the damage of colonialism and postcolonial dictatorships. Williams employs the metaphor of “wounds” and “monsters” to capture the lacunae between temporalities; while the past is over, its end is not as triumphant as those in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania had hoped, and the yet-to-arrive future seems to haunt the present moment. As the character Dr. See-Through in Francis Imbuga’s play The Successor states, “I do not look back, I only fght with the future.” Katherine A. Zien articulates how South American artist and activist Raúl Leis Romero used theatre as a tool of postcolonial planning and decolonial world-making during and after the US military occupation of the Panama Canal Zone in the late twentieth and early twenty-frst centuries. While Panama gained independence from Colombia in 1903, Zien explains how coloniality of power— or deep-rooted racial hierarchies, extractive processes, and core-periphery models of modern capitalism—has pervaded Latin American countries. Leis’s theatre for social change resisted Panama’s neocolonial relationship with the United States by celebrating African descent and indigeneity, making the poor the protagonist of the nation, and protesting pentagonism. By turning to folk performance and sociodrama, Leis encouraged audiences to throw of the colonizer’s culture. Mina Kyounghye Kwon gives a transcontextual view of absurdist plays from Nigeria, Korea, and North America in the 1960s and 1970s. As she explains, Nigeria gained independence from Great Britain in 1960, Korea gained independence from Japan in 1945, but Native North Americans are still subject to deep-settler colonialism. Kwon analyzes how the plays from these three regions use the absurd joke, or a joke that mocks the teller and the audience, to tell after empire narratives. She chronicles how each of the playwrights in her chapter—Ola Rotimi (Nigeria), Oh Taesuk (Korea), and Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa and Delaware)—turn to Theatre of the Absurd to communicate the disillusionment of occupation, colonialism, and national leadership. She shows how these populations are an example of minor transnationalism, hovering between authoritarian and grassroots models of resistance to negotiate and navigate the stresses of empire. Gibson Alessandro Cima investigates three post-apartheid plays in twentyfrst-century South Africa: Martin Koboekae’s Biko: Where the Soul Resides (2008), Aubrey Sekhabi’s Mantolo: The Tenth Step (2009), and Mike Van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors (2014). Cima argues that these plays engage in embodied historiography, or the idea of processing history and memory through performance. He observes that

Introduction

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artists in the post-post-apartheid moment faced the challenge of no longer having resistance as a central theme as well as pressure from politicians to “get over” apartheid. His choice of plays allows for an exploration of how plays can or should present national heroes (such as Steven Biko and Neil Aggett) posthumously and how they should make space to interact with freedom fghters who are still alive (such as Sibusiso Masuku) in a time when democracy seems to have failed much of the population. Eleanor Owicki and Megan E. Geigner bring Irish playwright Brendan Behan into the after empire conversation. While Ireland was subject to English rule for centuries (and some Irish counties remain under the rule of Great Britain), Ireland was never classifed as a colony. Generations of Irish fought against the British, but once Ireland gained independence in the 1920s, the country fell into civil war. As a youth, Behan was part of the fght, something he learned from his family. His two 1950s plays—The Quare Fellow and The Hostage—do not bask in a post-freedom glow, however, but instead present the feelings of emptiness, lack of change, rejection, and letdown of Irish nationalism in the generation after independence. Elif Baş explains the history of the development of Turkish theatre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Baş centers theatre as both an outlet for and tool of the struggle to create a distinctive Turkish identity in the years just before, during, and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. She shows how confict between those fghting for a constitutional government in Turkey, those pushing for an Islamic state, and those clinging to Ottoman identity played out in the push to revive traditional performance (karagöz or puppet theatre; and orta oyunu, a performance style) and storytelling (meddah) against ongoing eforts to import and imitate Western theatre, which had been introduced to Turkey in the Tanzimat period (1839–1876). She provides the example of a young Ottoman newspaper editor and actor, Namik Kemal, who staged nationalistic plays to use theatre as an ideological tool and political weapon to rouse the masses. Baş also explains how after independence in 1923, those in power used Western-style theatre to impose patriotic ideals on a new nation. Baş tracks how traditional Turkish theatre forms faded as nationalists adopted Western-style plays as political propaganda. David Donkor explores the role of the Ghana National Theatre Movement in defning the “African Personality” after independence from Great Britain in the 1950s. Like other chapters in this collection, Donkor demonstrates that political sovereignty did not free Ghanaians from a colonial mentality. The nation’s leaders—namely Kwame Nkrumah—hoped theatre would help shatter this mindset by revitalizing precolonial traditions. Donkor gives examples of the plays that the National Theater Movement inspired in the 1950s and 1960s including Michael Die-Annang’s Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool and Efua Suterland’s Foriwa and Edufa. But he also ofers a critique of the movement and of the movement’s critics. Donkor argues that the failure to take the concert party, a form of itinerant popular theatre, seriously resulted in the Movement not being able to reach the people. Siyuan Liu gives a sweeping history of theatre in China, Japan, India, and Indonesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Liu unpacks the link between

12 Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young

coloniality/postcoloniality and modern Asian spoken theatre’s relationship with indigenous performance. He marks a split between spoken drama genres developed after or during contact with the West (such as Japanese shingeki, Chinese huaju, and Indonesian teater moderen) and traditional performance or hybrid genres (such as Beijing Opera or sangeetnatak [Indonesian music dramas]). Liu tracks the tension between these forms through modernist movements in the 1920s, the communist movements in the 1930s and 1940s, independence and nationalist movements in the mid-century, along with more recent coups, cultural revolutions, and shifts in law, politics, and government in Asia through the end of the twentieth century. Looking at this larger trend to revitalize traditional theatre while still producing Realism, Liu analyzes the work of specifc twentieth-century theatre artists in each country. Jessica Nakamura uses Chong Wishing’s 2008 play Yakiniku Drago to illustrate the intersections between persisting imperial infuences and theatre’s ability to reveal power dynamics even in domestic, quotidian life. The play is about an ethnically Korean family (Zainichi) living in Osaka in the years leading to Expo ’70. Nakamura argues that Yakiniku Drago showcases the way that the home is a site where empire remains, and, as such, can be a place to confront its painful history. Furthermore, Nakamura contends that the play’s staging of poor Zainichi challenges Japanese postwar logic claiming empire as an aberration, a detour on the way to economic prosperity. Embracing Homi Bhabha’s theorization of unhomely moment and Karen Shimakawa’s concept of national abjection, Nakamura provides a picture of lingering empire creating difused, generational subjugation. Victoria Fortuna investigates the efects of dictatorship and exile in relationship to legacies of empire in Latin American countries from the independence era to the global Cold War. Specifcally, Fortuna provides a reading of performance genres in Fernando Solanas’s 1985 flm Tango: El exilio de Gardel. The flm is about a group of Argentinian political exiles living in Paris in the 1980s, but it makes reference to nineteenth-century fgures in Argentina’s struggle for independence. They stage a tanguedia, a performance combining tango, tragedy, comedy, and rioplatense (Argentine and Uruguayan) traditions. Fortuna reads the movement styles both as capturing the fractured and violent experience of exile and as a tool of resistance to cultural imperialism that sexualizes Latin American bodies. Fortuna’s observations about the way the flm blurs time periods, space, reality, and fction reveals the power of dance to ofer embodied social critique. Kareem Khubchandani introduces the debut production of Harvey Virdi 2017 play Miss Meena and the Masala Queens in England. Khubchandani explores how Meena Kumari, a Hindi cinema legend, became a diva and a repository of queer feelings to sustain diasporic South Asians. The play, Khubchandani argues, creates spaces that do not actually exist—namely gay bars specifcally geared toward South Asians living in England—demonstrating the kind of world-making that theatre and performance can do. By providing a reading of the nostalgia of Bollywood, the historical context of Meena Kumari’s life and

Introduction

13

the ways her acting reference pre- and postcolonial Indian performance genres, this chapter shows how performance allows space for collectively feeling Brown in the midst of the melancholies of migration, colonization, displacement, and heteronormativity. The fnal chapter is Esther Kim Lee’s analysis of Qui Nguyen’s play Vietgone. Lee argues that the unconventional use of language—hip hop by the Vietnamese characters and gibberish by the white American characters—and music in Vietgone point to a broader history of Asian American theatre. In a world that privileges Western language, appearance, and sound, Nguyen fips the script. Lee shows how conceptions such as refugee, foreigner, and even war still maintain imperial structures and highlights how theatre can be a tool to unmoor stereotypes, create community, open up casting possibilities, and resist cultural imperialism. These case studies—moving from the nineteenth to the twenty-frst centuries and from East Africa to a Vietnam War refugee camp in Arkansas by way of Panama, Nigeria, Korea, the United States, South Africa, Ireland, Turkey, Ghana, China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Argentina, France, and England—illustrate a breadth of after empire theatre and performance. Despite diferences with respect to time, place, and form of imperialism, common themes emerge. The frst is the recuperation of folk tradition, whether pre- or post-empire, such as karagöz, kabuki, and jatra (pre) and concert parties, Hip Hop, and diva worship (post). The second is the development of hybrid performance such as Beijing Opera, tanguedia, and social drama. And the third is the turn to the absurd as a way to deal with incoherent time and policy. Finally, each chapter makes the case for the social impact of theatre—to form national identity, to protagonist the subaltern, to process pain, and to make a new world where the future becomes the present.

Notes 1 Michael Billington, “Hamilton Review: Revolutionary Musical a Thrilling Salute to America’s Immigrants,” The Guardian, 23 December 2017. www.theguardian.com/ stage/2017/dec/21/hamilton-review-musical-london-victoria-palace-lin-manuelmiranda. 2 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxii. 3 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxxii. 4 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xix. 5 Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Boundary 2 20, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 24–50, 40–41. 6 George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), 6. 7 Lisa Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 8 and 11. 8 Benjamin Poore, Theatre & Empire (London: Palgrave, 2016), 8. 9 Poore, Theatre & Empire, 43. 10 Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 10.

14 Megan E. Geigner and Harvey Young

11 In Empire, Hardt and Negri use the term “imperialism” to defne the model of power prevalent from the early modern period to the twentieth century, wherein nation-states claimed lands beyond their borders as their own. In contrast, we use the word “empire” to mean this. Hardt and Negri then defne “empire” to mean a more contemporary idea of “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule.” Our conception of after empire includes this apparatus. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 12 Claire Cochran, Twentieth-Century British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. 13 George Rude, The French Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 155–156. 14 Kate Marsh, Narratives of the French Empire (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013), 4. 15 Marsh, Narratives of the French Empire, 4. 16 Benjamin Steiner, Building the French Empire, 1600–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 17 Marsh, Narratives of the French Empire, 5. 18 Joshua Yafa, “‘They Will Destroy You’ in Putin’s Russia, How Far Can Artists Go,” Guardian, 17 January 2020. 19 Helen Gilbert, “Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian Theatre in the 1990s,” in Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s, ed. Veronica Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 71. 20 Veronica Kelly, “Old Patterns, New Repertoires,” in Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s, ed. Veronica Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 8. 21 Much of this section is informed by the animated maps at Nancy Jacobs and Rolando Peñate, “Animated Atlas of African History, 1879–2002,” brown.edu/Research/ AAAH.com and at “The Map as History,” the-map-as-history.com. Additional resources that informed this section include David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Empires 1414–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Karen Barkey, Empire of Diference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Diference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).

1 DR. SEE-THROUGH AND HIS KIN East African Theatre in the Interregnum Joshua Williams

In 1992, at a conference in Harare, Biodun Jeyifo opened an interview with Nadine Gordimer by reminding her that the epigram for her 1981 novel July’s People is Antonio Gramsci’s famous contention that “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”1 Jeyifo asked whether the impending end of apartheid meant that “the ‘morbid symptoms’ [had] been averted”—to which Gordimer replied, with characteristic caution, by listing some of the formations that still stood in the way of the new being born, from “the rise of the extreme right-wing white groups, the neo-Nazis” to “the revival of tribalism for political means.” “[I]t gives me quite a cold feeling,” she said, “to see that Gramsci was right.”2 Gramsci’s morbid interregnum retains its potency as a fgure for political upheaval and revolutionary change. Abstracted from its original grounding in the Italian left’s attempt to contain the rising power of fascism in the 1930s, it has proven broadly applicable to moments of decolonial transition in the Global South. The difculty, however, as Jeyifo and Gordimer’s exchange makes clear, lies in determining when and where the interregnum begins and—crucially—when and where it ends. The word itself suggests a defnite interval, “inter-regnum,” between two distinct political dispositions, but Gramsci’s characterization of that interval invokes its indeterminacy. The old is dying, not dead, and the new has not yet been born—in fact cannot be born—which means its arrival is indefnitely deferred. Jeyifo’s line of questioning presupposes that the formal end of apartheid could in fact mark a defnitive break with the past; Gordimer’s response bespeaks the dogged persistence, and even the “revival,” of ethnic politics in the “new South Africa.” The interregnum is doomed to continue. In this chapter, I contend with a difcult period of East African history that is analogous in many ways to the fraught transition between apartheid and multiracial democracy under Mandela. Between 1961 and 1963, Tanganyika,

16 Joshua Williams

Uganda, and Kenya became independent from the United Kingdom; in 1964, a Marxist revolution in Zanzibar led to unifcation with the mainland and the formation of Tanzania. Uhuru—“freedom” in the Swahili language, and a watchword of anti-colonial struggles across the region—inaugurated a decade of rapid social and political change, much of which would shortly be frustrated, if not outright betrayed, by the increasing brutality of the Milton Obote and Idi Amin regimes in Uganda (1966–1979)3 and the authoritarian hardening of oneparty rule under Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya (1969–1982).4 As even this skeletal account makes clear, the end of British colonialism in East Africa occasioned morbidity of various kinds on a massive scale. Consequently, conceiving of the 1960s and 1970s as a Gramscian interregnum in Ugandan; Kenyan; and, to a lesser extent, Tanzanian politics provides critical leverage on questions of literature and culture. In the frst place, it militates against any reading of postcolonial theatre-making—which will be the focus of this chapter—as moving inexorably from euphoria on the brink of Uhuru to despair on the eve of Amin. Some of the bleakest works of Kenyan and Ugandan theatre date from the frst few years of Independence. Why is this the case? Why isn’t Peter Nazareth’s remarkable 1964 radio play The Hospital, for instance, a paean to the restorative promises of self-rule rather than a darkly comic account of neglect and death at the heart of the postcolonial state? I contend that because Uhuru did not mark a defnitive end to colonialism and imperialism in East Africa so much as the inauguration of an ambivalent period of decolonial transition, the morbidity of The Hospital was in fact to be expected. There were, of course, many Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian artists who embraced political cant in the 1960s and 1970s, singing the praises of Independence and the new political order. But dismissing Nazareth—and with him virtually all the other leading fgures of East African theatre and performance, like Mĩcere Mũgo, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ebrahim Hussein, Francis Imbuga, John Ruganda, and Robert Serumaga—as somehow out of sync with the times obscures the many provocative ways in which morbidity took the stage during this period. The medical logic of the term “morbid symptoms” resonates with plays—like The Hospital, Mũgo’s The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, Ngũgĩ’s The Wound in the Heart, Imbuga’s Game of Silence, or Hussein’s Mashetani—that survey the physical and emotional damage of colonialism and its afterlives. The analytical purchase of Gramsci’s formulation extends still further, however; in the Italian original, he points not only to symptoms but to “fenomeni morbosi,”5 or “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind com[ing] to pass.”6 The capaciousness of this understanding of morbidity has inspired an interpretive eclecticism. In his application of Gramsci to contemporary politics, for instance, Slavoj Žižek has moved beyond the biomedical by refguring the interregnum as “‘the time of monsters.’” 7 This formulation, while inexact, proves illuminating in the East African case. Monsters appear alongside maladies in the theatrical history of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, giving shape to the atavistic remainders of colonialism in Hussein’s Ngao ya Jadi and the ecocidal excess of postcolonial dictatorship

East African Theatre in the Interregnum 17

in Ruganda’s The Floods. But the most consequential of the “morbid phenomena” that characterize this period of transition may well be the uncanny involution or suspension of time itself. Plays, like Francis Imbuga’s The Successor, that engage explicitly with the contested temporality of the transfer of power, give the East African interregnum its dramatic shape while providing a line of fight out of the politics of disillusionment and despair. As Dr. See-Through, the prophet at the heart of The Successor, proclaims, “I do not look back. I only fght with the future.”8 Like Dr. See-Through, the theatre-makers of the East African interregnum refuse to accept the foreclosure of the revolutionary anticolonial project. In that sense, the exploded temporality of their plays allies itself with the work of radical postcolonialism more broadly. In his introduction to the issue of Callaloo in which Gordimer’s interview with Jeyifo appears, Tejumola Olaniyan suggests that “our unease” with the designation postcolonial might be “accented diferently” if it were re-oriented around questions of time: Implicit in our justifed unease in claiming “post-colonial” is the discriminating recognition that we are living a temporality that is not so easily, so triumphantly categorized, located as it is between the end of formal empire and, as we have all agreed, the inability to be post-colonial. Our crisis of thought and scholarship is one of the resident “morbid symptoms” of this acephalous, interregnumal space. But rather than a cause for lament, I submit that the “morbidity” be claimed and afrmed and catalyzed to a decisive crisis.9 If postcolonial literature exists after empire but before the postcolonial has been unambiguously achieved, then any attempt to circumscribe it historically is inevitably premature. The rise of Amin and Moi certainly does mark a turning point in the literary history of East Africa, as does the subsequent exile of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Mĩcere Mũgo, the untimely death of Robert Serumaga and the gradual dispersal of the intellectual, artistic, and political energies that sustained the theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. But the work of bringing what Ngũgĩ has called Afro-modernity10 into being continues—and the theatre that he and others made in the East African interregnum, far from merely cataloging the gathering dark of that period, makes the deathliness of time and history a catalyst, as Olaniyan says, “to a decisive crisis.”

Woundedness The Kenyan writers and intellectuals Mĩcere Mũgo and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously collaborated on the 1976 play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, which commemorates Field Marshall Kĩmathi’s leadership of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA)—also known as the Mau Mau—and the guerilla struggle it waged against the British in the decade before Uhuru.11 Mũgo and Ngũgĩ found this

18 Joshua Williams

commemoration necessary because the Kenyatta and Moi governments spurned the radical anti-imperialist legacy of the KLFA in favor of Africanizing the political and economic machinery inherited from colonialism. This dispensation persisted for decades; Oby Obyerodhyambo recalls that the 1990 revival of The Trial was only permitted to take place because Nelson Mandela, who had recently been freed from prison and was visiting Kenya as part of a thank-you tour of African countries that had supported the anti-apartheid struggle, publicly expressed his admiration for Kĩmathi in the presence of an embarrassed President Moi.12 For both Mũgo and Ngũgĩ, making The Trial was a reparative gesture, an efort to stanch the wounds that both authors had catalogued in their earlier work. This woundedness is the frst of the morbid phenomena arising out of the East African interregnum that I consider here. Wounds are durational, marking an interval between injury and scar. They index the persistence of pain and the possibility or impossibility of healing, rooting the passage of time in the fesh while remaining curiously outside of time themselves. The wounded subject is always already hurt and always not yet whole. Mũgo and Ngũgĩ’s early plays locate this uncanny temporality in and around the moment of Uhuru, in the lingering pain of anticolonial struggles like the KLFA’s, and the vital questions they left unanswered. In the introduction to her 1971 play The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti,13 Mũgo notes that inspiration struck her when considering the psychic toll of the US war in Vietnam: …[this] brought my mind back home. Sure, there were no more guns or bombs to be heard on Nyandarua or Kirinyaga forests, but had the ugly sounds died in people’s minds? Had the war for liberation really ended? Could the gashes and deep wounds furrowed by the experience of colonization be seen as healed, or were the ugly scars left a permanent symbolic reminder that the enemy had hit so deep that he would remain with us for a long, long time? […] How had the Kenyan nation responded to this very painful, haunting experience?14 The eponymous ex-Chief Kiti in Mũgo’s play chose the side of the colonial administration during the war against the KLFA. His eldest son Mata fought with the guerrillas and blames his father for the hardships he endured. It is not entirely clear whether Mata knows—or is willing to admit—that Kiti was imprisoned and had his chiefship stripped from him for attempting to intervene on his son’s behalf after he was captured. What is clear is that the old man is slowly dying from an unidentifed malady that seems at least partially due to the pain of his estrangement from his frst-born. This is one of the “deep wounds furrowed by the experience of colonization” that Mũgo observes in independent Kenya’s body politic. Both Kiti and Mata are traumatized by the war and the “ugly sounds” of bombs; the war damaged guerrillas and colonial collaborators alike. Mata is nearly speechless with drunkenness and ill-suppressed rage in both of the scenes in which he appears. Kiti, for his part, spends much of his time with his friend

East African Theatre in the Interregnum 19

Mbogo, who fought with the KLFA, trading stories of the wounds they incurred on opposite ends of the battlefeld: KITI: [Those days] were the beginning of this my chest trouble. The cough

that eats me now came from carrying a gun day in and day out during the Emergenet.15 H’m! These eyes have seen things. Battles like the one-week Nyandurua one left a good part of Muranga without half its men folk. You remember? MBOGO: Remember? I see it as clearly as I see you now. I can hear those guns. Dead men lay on Nyandarua slopes like banana stumps. For three weeks! The smell of dead bodies was in the air ten miles around. H’m, do I remember? Who will ever forget? That war maimed our tribe. […] KITI: One day the white man will pay for this! He will. MBOGO: And what about our own people? We fought among ourselves, brother

killing brother — like fools! I have always said the traditional chiefs should have resigned the day the Mergenet was declared. Fighting on the side of the white man was agreeing to the death of our people. KITI ( furiously): And where were you at the time, with your good advice? What is the use of talking now when everything is over? MBOGO (heatedly): I will talk. I will talk because my son died in that war and my brother came out of it a beast. The wound still hurts. It hurts today. […] KITI (with angry sarcasm): …Only Mbogo sufered…. You only speak of your

brother; your son. Look at me. (shows his thigh.) Look at this leg. That was made by a bullet. A bullet! Yes. And in my ill days I have no frst-born to prepare my grave. Don’t tell me about wounds!16 This passage reveals how pervasive and how deep the wounds left by the “painful, haunting experience” of the KLFA war were in the frst few years of Uhuru. While political diferences between Mbogo and Kiti lead to “heated” discussion even “now when everything is over,” it is clear that “everyone sufered.”17 Indeed, the wounds that Kiti’s and Mbogo’s and Mata’s bodies carry index the broader wounding, or “maim[ing],” of the family, the village, the tribe, the nation, and even the earth itself, bearing as it does the weight of bodies like “banana stumps.” These “heated,” “furious” discussions also give the lie to the rhetoric of healing and closure that Kiti invokes when he protests that “everything is over:” Kiti’s titular “long illness,” his “chest trouble,” began on the battlefeld and persists years later; Mbogo remembers the carnage at Nyandarua “as clearly as I see you now;” his wound “still hurts….it hurts today.” Even while it purported to open onto a radically new reality, Uhuru remained haunted by the traumatic inheritances of colonial oppression and the internecine violence it encouraged and sustained. The promise of revenge—“One day the white man will pay for this!”18 —is projected onto a future as uncertain as the past is morbidly present.

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Joshua Williams

The play exists, therefore, in the suspended temporality of the wound, of the “long illness,” deathly but not deadly. The story ends as it begins: Mata and Kiti haven’t reconciled; Kiti remains on his deathbed but still hasn’t died; even the “traditional dances” that Kiti’s second son Musa arranges to comfort his father and ease his passing are postponed until at least “tomorrow.”19 Ngũgĩ has written forcefully on woundedness as well. In the third volume of his memoirs, Birth of a Dream Weaver, he moves from marking his hurt at the exclusion of his 1962 play The Wound in the Heart from an important drama festival at the Kampala National Theatre to a far-reaching discussion of the many traumas occasioned by colonialism and its violence. He calls this chapter “The Wound in the Land.”20 Like the wounds that Mbogo and Kiti mirror back to one another, the pain indexed in The Wound in the Heart travels uncannily from person to person within the body politic. Ruhiu, a KLFA veteran, returns home from detention to discover that his wife was raped and impregnated by a British ofcer while he was gone. Desperately afraid that Ruhiu will reject her, his unnamed and unseen wife commits suicide; Ruhiu himself follows suit. Simon Gikandi suggests that this “double suicide is seen as a dramatic solution to the problem of wounds that refuse to heal, of pasts that fail to go away.”21 While this is true on the level of form, it is less clear that death marks a “solution” to the woundedness that the play lays bare. In fact, the wound belongs in the frst instance not to Ruhiu or to his wife but to an elder who heard Ruhiu promise, long before the action of the play begins, that he would sacrifce himself for the sake of the village in the KLFA war; “…this cold prophecy made me feel something creep into the fesh and make a wound in the heart.”22 This elder and his companion ask whether what has happened to Ruhiu’s wife—her physical and psychic woundedness—“will make a fresh wound in your heart and mine;”23 they note that “The whole dark Emergency has left incurable wound [sic] in the country, which might go on bleeding for a long time to come.”24 The wound is expansive, all-encompassing. It metastasizes as it moves from subject to subject. The leader of the elders notes that it is “deeper than [he] thought.”25 When Ruhiu learns of his wife’s rape, the wound fnally becomes ambivalently his: he laments that “the white man…has stabbed me in the heart.”26 Ruhiu’s woundedness leads him to suicide just as his wife’s woundedness did. But the temporality of the wound is not susceptible to closure. After the death of her son and her daughter-in-law, Ruhiu’s mother Wangari proclaims that “It is all over now,” but in almost the same breath laments that “[she] too will bear this wound in [her] heart.”27 In this morbid interregnum, not even death causes symptoms to abate. In plays like The Wound in the Heart, there seems to be no room for healing. No representative of the new steps forward to make manifest Uhuru’s promise of reconciliation, restoration, and repair.28 The Ugandan writer Peter Nazareth’s surrealist radio play The Hospital (1964) suggests that this is not so much a function of the fedgling postcolonial state’s limited capacity to improve the lives of its subjects as it is a manifestation of ofcial indiference and neglect.

East African Theatre in the Interregnum 21

A patient—known only by number, 555—dreams of an impending surgery that promises more damage rather than less: VOICE 1: Number fve-fve-fve, we are going to perform an emergency opera-

tion. Your lungs are diseased so we must remove your liver. […] VOICE 4: VOICE 5: VOICE 1: VOICE 2:

Bring in the supplies of blood. In a day or two. We will amputate his hands. He sufers from fallen arches. It cost the Government a fortune to build this hospital. Money is being wasted because of people like you. VOICE 3: Did he brush his teeth today? We cannot operate if he has not. VOICE 4: Bring the supplies of blood. VOICE 5: In a week or two. VOICE 1: We are ready. VOICE 4: The surgical instruments have been mislaid. VOICE 1: Bring any instruments you can fnd. There are some plumbers and carpenters’ tools in the store. Bring them. He sufers from headaches, so we must remove his heart. VOICE 2: That table cost the government several pounds. The medicine cost the government hundreds of pounds. The nurses cost the government thousands of pounds. VOICE 4: I’ve found the surgical instruments but they are rusty. VOICE 1: That doesn’t matter. We will use them. VOICE 4: Bring the supplies of blood. VOICE 5: In a year or two.29 In the Kaf kaesque world of this hospital, one wound deserves another; the surgical instruments are missing, damaged, or interchangeable with carpenters’ tools; and the blood bank won’t send along what is required for the surgery for a day or a week or a year. This morbid state of afairs derives not from incompetence but a willful neglect stemming from the government’s ruthless economization of life. 555’s value is weighed against the cost of building, equipping, and stafng the hospital—and he comes up wanting. He is informed that “Money is being wasted” in this haphazard attempt to treat what ails him. Nazareth does not specify the setting of his play. However, when The Hospital was broadcast on the BBC’s African Service in 1964, with an international cast of African actors, the resonant intersection of text and performance suggested that the skinfint government in question was that of a new postcolonial state. In his dream, 555 escapes from the hospital and appeals to a succession of passers-by for help. The last of these, an “Orator,” is making a rousing speech on a street corner that drowns out 555’s cries. The Orator proclaims that “So far, you have been living in poverty…but now that they are gone, all that will change.”30 Ironically, the Orator’s enthusiasm for change in the wake of “[their]” departure precludes his

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hearing 555 and helping him change his desperate circumstances. With whichever colonial power that once held sway gone, promises of the new abound— “The masses shall be uplifted. There will be more transport, more clothes, more jobs, more food, more money”31—but representatives of the state, like the Orator, show little interest in translating their sloganeering into help for those who need it. The next morning, 555’s roommate in the hospital discovers that he has died in his sleep; the Nurse who confrms this for the audience blithely remarks “Yes, he’s dead. Ah, well, it’s just one of those things. He would have died soon anyway…. No one could have helped him.”32 The haunting dreamscape of The Hospital bespeaks a fnal kind of woundedness in plays from the interregnum that seems to particularly afict characters who see themselves as intellectuals. Despite important eforts by groups like the Makerere Travelling Theatre and, later, Ngũgĩ’s collaborators at Kamĩrĩĩthu to take multilingual theatre to—or make it with—“the masses of people,”33 East African theatre of the 1960s and 1970s remained deeply invested in the experiences of the university-educated intelligentsia from which the overwhelming majority of playwrights and performers emerged. While less likely to bear the kind of wounds that trouble veterans of armed confict like ex-Chief Kiti’s friend Mbogo, the students, artists, and professionals who populate the plays of the period often sufer from debilitating anxiety stemming from the unsettled politics of Uhuru. Game of Silence (1977) is perhaps the clearest example from the Kenyan writer Francis Imbuga’s wide-ranging oeuvre of this particular brand of woundedness. In this vertiginous psychodrama, Raja—an African student returning home from studying abroad—traverses a pathless terrain of dreams and hallucinations. He sufers a devastating loss, but it is unclear whether it is his daughter or his sister who has died. He is confned against his will, but it is unclear whether he has been institutionalized for psychosis or jailed for sedition. The closest he comes to a diagnosis is a thinly veiled political threat: “You sufered a severe stroke of political insanity, an infectious disease that seems to be spreading fast, and to which we attribute the present wave of strikes in the country.”34 Similarly, in the Tanzanian playwright Ebrahim Hussein’s 1971 play Mashetani—Devils in English translation—a university student, Kitaru, is so overcome with anxiety that he lapses into what his doctor calls “neurosis.” Kitaru’s mother, alarmed by the doctor’s use of this unfamiliar English word, asks if it means “ghosts,” to which the doctor laughingly replies “It’s not ghosts. It’s—I don’t quite know how to say it in Swahili…. Massive exhaustion of the mind.”35 Perhaps the distance between these two conceptions of emotional afiction is not so great after all; Kitaru is as haunted by his circumstances as he is exhausted by them. Like Imbuga, Hussein elected to set part of his play inside his protagonist’s head as he grapples with the intractable question of whether or not the devilry of colonialism has been exorcised by anticolonial struggle.36 While the looming threat of authoritarianism was not as keenly felt in Dar es Salaam as it was in Kampala or Nairobi, Julius Nyerere’s long tenure at the helm of the Tanganyikan and then Tanzanian state (1961–1985) was marked by uncertainty as to whether his largely socialist approach to economic and political development

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could achieve a real and lasting independence. In reducing the terrain of political contestation to the interior of a single troubled mind, Hussein and Imbuga are drawing on an understanding of Uhuru as the site and source of a psychic wound. This woundedness, like ex-Chief Kiti’s or Ruhiu’s or 555’s, carries with it the uncanny temporality of haunting. The past is dead but not quite gone. The promised future has not come. The present hurts and waits.

Monstrosity Žižek’s characterization of the interregnum as “‘the time of monsters,’”37 while not entirely faithful to Gramsci, has proven infuential because it captures the often-fantastical forms that epochal change takes. In the East African case, the unsettled period between Uhuru and the defnitive establishment of strongman authoritarianism under Amin and Moi produced its share of monsters. In Hussein’s plays, for instance, monstrosity is a recurrent theme, wedded, as in Mashetani (Devils), to an anxiety that the new order will prove illusory. S.D. Kiango and T.S.Y. Sengo, like most Tanzanian critics in the 1970s, argue that it is colonialism that bedevils the play, prompting Kitaru’s bouts of neurosis.38 In a recent essay, Emiliano Minerba moves past this narrowly allegorical reading while continuing to insist that Mashetani is a work of theatrical horror.39 Monsters haunt the periphery, born out of the morbidity of the interregnum. Occasionally they spring forward and attack characters like Kitaru—and then leave their wounds to fester. In his work on monsters in the theatre, Michael Chemers notes that they tend to elude capture, reappearing in text after text, performance after performance, in new—and newly frightening—guise.40 For Hussein and other East African dramatists in the 1970s, this protean quality inherent in monstrosity refected political reality. Hussein’s 1976 poem-play Ngao ya Jadi—The Shield of Tradition in English—opens with a young warrior’s heroic battle against Sesota, a monstrous, many-headed serpent. When Sesota is defeated, he vanishes, and the people celebrate. Euphoria, however, is short-lived. STORYTELLER: The music went on until

Theft went unnoticed Very few people made the efort To stand their burned-down huts up again Those good-for-nothings and those unmarried ones Came wearing large black glasses Hiding behind them […] And the friends of the Chief Since they were economic experts They put young girls under arrest41

24 Joshua Williams

While Hussein eschews overt political commentary in his work, Ngao ya Jadi is especially open to allegorical reading. Amandina Lihamba suggests that the warrior’s initial defeat of Sesota might correspond to either the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar that displaced the ruling aristocracy or Nyerere’s turn to socialism in the 1967 Arusha Declaration.42 These were both signifcant attempts to overturn a colonial order that privileged capital over democracy, and the interests of a white and Arab ruling class over those of the Black majority.43 Neither, however, remade the world entirely. Some of the snake’s poison remains. In Ngao ya Jadi, after the battle and the ensuing revelry, no one bothers to “stand” the houses that Sesota destroyed “up again,” and the village is soon invaded by “economic experts,” “friends of the Chief,” who hide behind their sunglasses and “put young girls under arrest.” This surreptitious reestablishment of the old economic order, enabled by the people’s neglect of the revolutionary project and abetted by brazen acts of gendered violence, portends the arrival of Sesota’s second head, “That little, renegade cloud…. / Emerging above the distant horizon.”44 Or perhaps the economic experts are Sesota’s second head, the monstrosity of imperial domination reemerging as neoliberal soft power. The old has not died so much as it has been rebranded; the new cannot be born, but every year “People were married / Babies were born / And there were more and more freaks.”45 The endless reappearance of Sesota, like the eternal woundedness of ex-Chief Kiti, speaks to the uncanny tendency of time in the interregnum to eddy and pool. In The Floods, frst performed in Nairobi in 1971, the Ugandan playwright John Ruganda conceptualizes each act as a “wave” that drags former lovers Nankya, a writer and intellectual, and Bwogo, a bureaucrat with ties to the secret police, deeper and deeper into their increasingly murky past. The play is set on an island in Lake Victoria that is being evacuated because of impending foods. The foods themselves take monstrous shape as the play progresses and characters like Nankya and Kyeyune, a former fsherman, imagine the storm-tossed waters of the lake revealing its grisly secrets. Kyeyune recounts a traumatic afternoon on the water on which he caught a human corpse in his net: “A military man. Dead. Three long nails in his head, his genitals sticking out in his mouth. A big stone round his neck. His belly ripped open and the intestines oozing out.”46 Bwogo confesses that this man is one of many, that Lake Victoria “has been the tomb of…[l]orryfuls of wailing civilians, driven to their deaths, over the clif, at the point of bayonets.”47 This regime of torture—rendered viscerally present in Ruganda’s brutally explicit dialogue—has been instituted by the Boss, an unnamed head of state whom Kyeyune repeatedly characterizes as an “ogre” who has “turned against its kindred.”48 Because Lake Victoria is bordered by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and no specifc time or place beyond that is specifed, it is fruitless to speculate whether the ogre is Obote or Kenyatta or Moi or even an ascendant Amin; he is an amalgam of all their repressive energies, and more. Ruganda refgures the genocidal violence of torture and arbitrary disappearance as a monstrous act of ecocide, poisoning the waters of the lake with the disfgured

East African Theatre in the Interregnum 25

corpses of the disappeared. These waters rise in their turn, a revenant undead monster bearing down on Bwogo: NANKYA: The dead are no longer dead, Bwogo. They are up in arms to right

their wrongs. They have risen from their deep slumber at the bottom of the lake and are carrying shrouds of vengeance towards you. (Bwogo feeling caged, looks in all directions for an exit; none.) For seven years you have resisted their persistent beckoning, for seven years added hundreds to their number. They are tired of waiting, waiting without having you in their midst…. The lake is turbulent, all right. Violent waves clashing against each other, all because of you.49 Monstrosity breeds monstrosity. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, the foods are coming for their creator. This passage eerily reprises Gramsci’s invocation of the dying and the not-yet-born. The victims of the regime “are no longer dead” but “have risen,” reborn in the womb of the “turbulent” lake. The last seven years—presumably since Independence—have failed to deliver on their promise and the people are “tired of waiting.” In fact, the lake itself has tired of violence, both the ecological violence it has endured and the genocidal violence it has been forced to conceal, and has risen in wave after destructive wave. As Kyeyune understands, “her anger is unabatable. She will not relent.”50 The horror show of the interregnum has led Ruganda, like Hussein, into a kind of mythic time, in which seven years of repression and terror are refgured as a chthonic battle without end.

Fighting with the Future The morbid phenomena that mark the interregnum between Uhuru and Amin in East African theatre are intimately bound up with questions of time. Wounds that won’t heal and monsters that won’t die are temporal anomalies, uncanny lacunae in the orderly fow that ought to carry a people from their past, through their present, to their future. Instead, there is a convoluted circularity to East African politics from Uhuru onward. Amin ousted Obote then Obote ousted Amin.51 Even today, nearly sixty years into East African independence, dimensions of political reality fold back on themselves: Yoweri Museveni, who helped overthrow frst Amin and then Obote, is still the president of Uganda; Uhuru Kenyatta, Jomo Kenyatta’s son, named for the independence his father claimed to have achieved, is currently president of Kenya. It remains an open question whether the interregnum is over and the postcolonial has unambiguously begun. In his 1979 play The Successor, Francis Imbuga provides a line of fight out of this morass. The Successor is set in Masero, a fctional “semi-modern African empire.”52 Oriomra, one of the high-ranking chiefs of Masero, approaches the diviner Dr. See-Through to ask him to interpret the emperor’s dreams in such a way that he will be led to name his successor to the throne. “[Y]ou are the only

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man who can help us sweep tomorrow clean,” he tells Dr. See-Through, by avoiding “the storm” of violence that inevitably ensues when a ruler dies without having made the line of succession clear.53 Dr. See-Through meets and exceeds this mandate by not only prompting the emperor to name his successor but also exposing the machinations of chiefs like Oriomra to eliminate their rivals. Everyone who is supposed to have been killed is revealed by the end of the play to be still alive—and the underhanded Oriomra’s fate is left to the people because, even in this imperial monarchy, a person’s fate “cannot be left in the mouth of one man.”54 There is no question that writing this play at the height of the East African interregnum, when would-be emperors remained on their thrones for decades and fought bitterly to depose one another, was a utopian gesture. But Dr. See-Through’s determination to “only fght for the future”55 betrays a finty revolutionary spirit. He aims to intervene in time itself, to restore an orderly succession of events—and, in so doing, heal wounds and banish monsters. I see Dr. See-Through as emblematic of the spirit in which all of the plays I have considered here were written. By cataloging the morbidities of the East African interregnum, Mũgo, Ngũgĩ, Nazareth, Hussein, Ruganda, and Imbuga have attempted, in Tejumola Olaniyan’s words, to “[catalyze]” postcolonial politics to “a decisive crisis.”56 Dr. See-Through and his kin sought a way forward out of the indeterminacy of the interregnum. Forcing their audiences to see the wounds that colonialism and imperialism left, and the monstrous forms they continued to take, allowed these writers and their collaborators to insist on postcolonialism as a lasting political imperative. They insisted, in other words, as Mũgo put it after she returned to Kenya in the wake of the 2002 elections that fnally removed Daniel arap Moi from power, that “we want to say that things will go right—that we will make them go right.”57

Notes 1 Biodun Jeyifo, “An Interview with Nadine Gordimer: Harare, February 14, 1992.” Callaloo 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 922. The translation of Gramsci that Jeyifo quotes here—and that Gordimer uses in July’s People—closely resembles that favored by Hoare and Nowell-Smith in the now-classic Selections from the Prison Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geofrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 276. 2 Jeyifo, “An Interview with Nadine Gordimer: Harare, February 14, 1992,” 922–923. 3 This period is bookended by Obote’s assumption of emergency powers and Amin’s ouster. Obote ruled Uganda from 1962 until he was overthrown by Amin in 1971, then again from 1980 until 1985. Amin seized power in 1971 and held it until 1979. 4 This period is bookended by the assassination of opposition politician Tom Mboya and the ofcial declaration of a one-party state under Moi. Kenyatta ruled Kenya from 1963 until his death in 1978; Moi held power from 1978 until 2002. 5 The passage in question is entitled “Passato e presente,” in Quaderno 3, § 34. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni Del Carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Torino: Giulo Einaudi editore, 1975), 311. 6 Antonio Gramsci, “Past and Present,” Prison Notebooks, Third Notebook, § 34, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg, vol. 2, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 33.

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7 See Slavoj Žižek, “A Permanent Economic Emergency.” New Left Review 64 (August 2010): 95. Charles T. Wolfe attributes this translation to French editions of The Prison Notebooks, but the authoritative Gallimard edition contains a quite literal translation: “pendant cet interrègne on observe les phénomènes morbides les plus variés.” Charles T. Wolfe, “Introduction,” in Monsters and Philosophy, ed. Charles T. Wolfe, Texts in Philosophy 3 (London: College Publications, 2005), xi; Antonio Gramsci, “Passé et present,” in Cahiers de Prison, Cahier 3, § 34, ed. Robert Paris, trans. Claude Perrus and Pierre Laroche, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 283. 8 Francis Imbuga, The Successor (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1979), 9. 9 Tejumola Olaniyan, “On ‘Post-colonial Discourse:’ An Introduction.” Callaloo 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 746. 10 Ngũgĩ discusses Afro-modernity at length in the chapter entitled “Memory, Restoration and African Renaissance” in Something Torn and New. He argues that the African renaissance is coterminous with an emerging Afro-modernity from the dying colonialism of European empires. The European Renaissance launched European modernity; the African renaissance evolving in the struggle against the dark side of European modernity gave birth to Afro-modernity. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009), 73. 11 In this chapter I have used the diacritical remarks required by Gĩkũyũ orthography except when referring to published material that omits them. Notably, early editions of work by both Ngũgĩ and Mũgo do not include diacritical marks, even when it comes to the authors’ names. 12 Oby Obyerodhyambo, “Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o: The Unrecognized Black Hermit,” in African Theatre 13: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka, eds. Martin Banham, Femi Osofsan, and Kimani Njogu (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2014), 50–51. 13 In this chapter, I generally date plays according to the year they were fnished or frst performed, as many of the pieces I discuss—including The Long Illness and The Wound in the Heart—were not published until later. 14 Micere Githae Mũgo, The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti (Kampala: East African Literature Bureau, 1976), n.p. 15 Emergenet and mergenet are Gĩkũyũizations of the English word “Emergency,” which was the term the colonial government used to refer to the period of confict with the KLFA. 16 Mũgo, The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, 8–9. 17 Mũgo, The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, 8. 18 Notably, it is the ex-Chief, who allied himself with the British, who says this. While Mũgo’s characters can’t bring themselves to forgive each other for their divergent roles in the confict, they are clear on who their common enemy is. 19 Mũgo, The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, 61. 20 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (New York: The New Press, 2016), 1–16. 21 Simon Gikandi, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 174. 22 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Wound in the Heart,” in This Time Tomorrow (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1970), 20. 23 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Wound in the Heart,” 20. 24 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Wound in the Heart,” 20–21. 25 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Wound in the Heart,” 22. 26 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Wound in the Heart,” 26. 27 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Wound in the Heart,” 28. 28 Musa, the ex-Chief ’s younger son in The Long Illness, comes closest to fulflling this function. He attempts to intercede with Mata on their father’s behalf and comforts their mother when Mata refuses to return home. He also—seemingly

28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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efortlessly—navigates the dialectic of city and countryside, English and Gĩkũyũ, “modernity” and “tradition,” that stymies similarly conceived characters in Ngũgĩ’s The Black Hermit and The Rebels. Mbogo and another character, Kangi, both come to believe that Musa might be a “Mediator” or even a “Healer” in their community. That promise remains—must remain—unfulflled at the end of the play. Healing, like all manifestations of “the new,” is forever deferred. See in particular Mugo, The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, 60. Peter Nazareth, “The Hospital,” in Two Radio Plays (Kampala: East African Literature Bureau, 1976), 4–5. Nazareth, “The Hospital,” 8. Emphasis original. Nazareth, “The Hospital,” 8. Nazareth, “The Hospital,” 9. Emphasis original. Lydia Kayanja, “The Makerere Travelling Theatre in East Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 5, no. 1 (May 1967): 141. Kayanja’s article is a frst-hand account of the Travelling Theatre’s 1966 tour of Uganda and Kenya, and the Luganda, Luo, Swahili, and English plays it presented. Other traveling theatres, largely emerging from the university setting, were also at work in East Africa during this time period. For more on what Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ calls “the Kamĩrĩĩthu popular theater experiment” (1976–1982), see Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiongo’s Drama and the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Popular Theater Experiment (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007); Ingrid Björkman, Mother, Sing for Me: People’s Theatre in Kenya (London: Zed Books, 1989); and many of Ngũgĩ's published works, including, mostly famously, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literatures (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986). Francis Imbuga, Game of Silence (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1977), 50. Ebrahim N. Hussein, Mashetani, New Drama from Africa 2 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1971), 33. My translation. For more on Mashetani and the anxieties it fosters, see Joshua Williams, “And with Them Came Devils: Ebrahim Hussein, Mashetani and the Poetics of Doubt,” in African Theatre 17: Contemporary Dance, eds. Yvette Hutchison and Chukwuma Okoye (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2018), 153–162. Žižek, “A Permanent Economic Emergency,” 95. S.D. Kiango and T.S.Y. Sengo, “Mashetani,” in Ndimu Zetu 2: Uchambuzi Wa Maandishi Ya Kiswahili (Dar es Salaam: Longman, 1975), 6. Emiliano Minerba, “A Frightening Play: The Element of Horror in Hussein’s Mashetani.” Swahili Forum 24 (2017): 37–61. Michael Chemers, The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 29–30. Ebrahim N. Hussein, “Ngao Ya Jadi,” in Jogoo Kijijini and Ngao Ya Jadi (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1976), 47. My translation. Amandina Lihamba, “Politics and Theatre in Tanzania after the Arusha Declaration, 1967–1984” (PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 1985), 149–151. I have not done justice here to the complexities of race and ethnicity in the East African context. The term “Black” is especially limited in its analytical purchase, but the most common alternative—“African”—risks eliding the forms of diference that mark the political and cultural contestations that defned this period (and remain salient today). Hussein, “Ngao Ya Jadi,” 48–49. My translation. Hussein, “Ngao Ya Jadi,” 48. My translation. John Ruganda, The Floods (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1988), 10. Ruganda, The Floods, 19. Ruganda, The Floods, 12. Ruganda, The Floods, 46. Ruganda, The Floods, 51.

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51 This is a convenient shorthand. Amin fed Uganda in 1979 as Tanzanian and Ugandan rebel troops—some of them loyal to Obote, who was in exile in Tanzania— advanced. An interim government that was favorable to Obote was then established and Obote won a disputed election in 1980 to resume the Ugandan presidency. 52 Imbuga, The Successor, front matter. 53 Imbuga, The Successor, 8–9. 54 Imbuga, The Successor, 66. 55 Imbuga, The Successor, 9. 56 Olaniyan, “On ‘Post-Colonial Discourse:’ An Introduction,” 746. 57 Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, “Transcending Colonial and Neo-colonial Pathological Hangovers to Unleash Creativity,” in Writing and Speaking from the Heart of My Mind (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2012), 219.

2 BETWEEN EMPIRE AND DICTATORSHIP The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis Katherine A. Zien

Playwright, popular educator, journalist, and sociologist Raúl Leis Romero (1947–2011) was among the few Panamanian theatre practitioners whose dramatic oeuvres spanned occupation of the isthmus by the United States government (1904–1999) and the departure of the United States at the turn of the millennium. Leis wrote extensively about the hegemony of the US in Panama, yet he was never solely a critic of US imperialism. His plays, sociological research, and journalism also implicated Panamanian complicity and collaboration with the United States, for which he risked his career and, possibly, his life. Leis protested the Panamanian dictators General Omar Torrijos Herrera and General Manuel Noriega, who opposed the United States vocally while secretly and openly collaborating with the US government and US-based multinational corporations and banks. Yet Leis was also invested in imagining what would happen after the departure of the United States—not only in material terms but socially, culturally, and politically.1 Leis theorized the ways that Panamanians depreciated themselves and idolized US citizens, goods, media, and lifestyles. He was active in the opposition movement against Noriega, and he led eforts to create a new political party in Panama, the Movimiento Papa Egoró (MPE).2 In his academic and journalistic writing, activism, and theatre, Leis theorized and dreamed Panama’s possible futures. I detail Raúl Leis’s artistic and political trajectory, during and after US occupation, to illuminate how Leis intended his theatre to serve as a tool of postcolonial planning and decolonial world-making. For many Panamanians, the handover of the Canal Zone was enough to satisfy longings for autonomy and sovereignty. But for Leis (among others), this shift of power marked the beginning of a long, arduous process to treat complex societal divisions, a continuation of ongoing work of liberation from the racism, economic disparities, and alienation deeply rooted in the nation. While Leis acknowledged the end of US rule in

The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis 31

Panama as a monumental shift, he did not feel that this change alone could heal the long-standing harms of neocolonialism coupled with coloniality of power, which I defne below. In his plays, Leis sought to position Panama as a key locus for examining the intersection of colonialism and coloniality throughout the region. Leis’s plays are infuenced by Marxist anti-colonial and postcolonial theorists—including Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire—as well as the teachings of Paulo Freire and the “modernity and coloniality of power” group. As a participant in the robust tradition of theatre for social change percolating in Latin America at the time, Leis believed theatre to be a privileged place for decolonial extrication, or Freirean “dis-alienation,” from cultural, economic, political, and military oppressions. His plays dissect interlayered histories, depict several centuries of colonial predicaments, and use techniques like anachronism and Brechtian distancing to provoke audiences to apply these events to their present situations and foment concrete responses in the here and now. I will frst ofer thoughts on colonialism, neocolonialism, and coloniality before considering the history of the United States in Panama, then demonstrating how bimodal approaches to colonialism and coloniality operate in Leis’s theatrical and intellectual output. Whereas colonialism generally refers to more than 500 years of subjugation of peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas by European powers, neocolonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean describes the predominating political, military, and economic force of the United States in the region after Spain relinquished many Latin American colonies in the nineteenth century.3 As Spain’s infuence diminished, the United States entered the imperial vacuum to behave as the policeman of the Americas, invading Nicaragua, Panama, and other countries dozens of times in the stated interest of suppressing local unrest and securing political stability. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine provided diplomatic cover for the installation of US political and economic allies in positions of power in the US-Caribbean and US-Latin American world. The idea of “neocolonialism” was popularized by Kwame Nkrumah to describe economic, political, and cultural relationships between former colonial powers and their former colonies following decolonization.4 Enrique Dussel defnes neocolonialism in Latin America as the substitution of the former colony’s dependence on Spain or Portugal with “self-imposed dependency on other European or North American countries.”5 Elites in the postcolony replicate “colonial logic” in their relationships with international systems of fnance and multinational corporations.6 In the 1950s and 1960s, African, Asian, and Commonwealth countries were decolonizing, creating independent nation-states, and forming Third World and Non-Aligned coalitions.7 While observing these Afro-Asian coalitions, Latin American countries found themselves pulled into a hemispheric diplomatic, economic, and military “bloc” with the United States, even as they continued to be sovereign nations on paper. This neocolonial relationship inspired a surge of Latin American theory blending anti-colonial insights with economic structuralism. Raúl Prebisch’s dependency theory, for example, traced

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economic extraction and power between “center” and “periphery,” to illustrate “the development of underdevelopment.”8 During Latin America’s Cold War, theorists including Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Ramón Grosfoguel elaborated “modernity and coloniality of power” as a conceptual framework describing deeply rooted racial capitalist relations instituted by Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the New World. These relations persist long after the formal structures of colonialism have receded. Even for purportedly sovereign nation-states, global capitalism perpetuates “colonial/modern and Eurocentered” race-linked labor hierarchies formed by New World Conquest.9 Coloniality of power shares conceptual ground with neocolonialism but emphasizes unique New World origins. As Quijano observes, the discovery of the New World permitted the rise of “Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power.”10 Quijano locates a “fundamental [axis] of this model of power” in the “social classifcation of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination.”11 As such, “race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into the ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power.”12 Conjointly with their imposition of hierarchies founded on racial diference, the conquerors created “a new structure of control of labor and its resources and products.”13 This new structure made the colonies crucial to the emerging global market, as the resources extracted through colonization allowed Europe to become the world’s dominant economic power. The modern condition of capitalism was thus invented with and by the Conquest, and the capitalist relations that we experience today stem from the same racial hierarchies, extractive processes, and core-periphery models of economic dependency, despite independence movements that rejected Spanish rule and created nominal nation-states. If the Americas invented the concept of race and linked labor control to racial classifcation, then in the shift from colonization to coloniality local elites entered the roles vacated by the colonizers. Now Latin American elites, the “seignorial bourgeoisie,” occupy “high-order positions in the colonial administration” and serve as intermediaries and benefciaries of global capital. The basis of their dependency is not lack of resources (indeed, these are abundant) but their subordination to Europe based on their idealization of shared “racialized social interests with their European peers.”14 As such, Quijano asserts, “The coloniality of power still exercises its dominance, in the greater part of Latin America, against democracy, citizenship, the nation, and the modern nation-state.”15 As Diana Taylor observes, linking coloniality and militarism to theatricality: “[T]he abyss separating political reality from democratic rhetoric characterizes politics throughout modern Latin America […] Behind the ‘public stage’ of popular sovereignty there is a ‘private stage’ based on relations of domination.”16 In keeping with Taylor’s analysis, performance scholars have theorized the endurance of (often oppressive) roles independent of their enactors, and the repercussions of this relationship for persisting political structures. Concepts like Joseph Roach’s

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“efgy” and “surrogation,” Taylor’s “scenario,” and Richard Schechner’s classic formulation of “twice-behaved behavior” allow us to see the perpetuation of structures and norms amid surface-level changes.17 If performance scholars theorize the patterns whereby distinct actors step into pre-cast roles, we also entertain the possibility of shifting or altering these seemingly hard-set scenarios through the subversive promise of theatricality. For Elin Diamond, this might be feminist theatre utilizing Brechtian acting to subvert gender roles.18 For Latin American theatre-makers during the Cold War, a revitalized form of theatre (sometimes called “New Theatre,” or Teatro Nuevo/Nuevo Teatro) created the grounds for interventions in neocolonialism and the coloniality of power.19 Revolutionizing the practice of theatre became a focus across the region in the 1960s and following, whether this be Brazilian theatre-maker Augusto Boal’s “rehearsal of revolution,” or collective creation among groups like Peru’s Yuyachkani and Colombia’s Experimental Theatre of Cali.20 Theatre practitioners experimented with ways of reversing structures of oppression and enacting collectivist principles in artistic production and daily life. Latin America’s Cold War-era theatre movements were far from facsimiles, and in fact they varied greatly: some, for example, sought to overturn white supremacy, Eurocentric labor relations, and capitalist exploitation, and others foregrounded Indigenous and peasant (campesino) sociocultural forms. Nearly all contained an epistemic component regarding audience interaction, utilizing theatre to undo the “repress[ion of ] the colonized forms of knowledge production, the models of the production of meaning, their symbolic universe, the model of expression and objectifcation and subjectivity.”21 For Raúl Leis, theatre for social change had several goals: centering Afro-descendant and Indigenous ways of life, epistemes, and aesthesis; promoting anti-capitalist movements and protagonizing poor people; and protesting imperialism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Before examining how Leis’s theatre manifests these goals, I will briefy outline the history of the United States in Panama. This historical context is complex and multifaceted, and my discussion will not do it justice.22 The United States occupied Panama from 1904 to 1999, in the stated interest of operating the Panama Canal. During this time, the US government built military and civilian infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone, a 553-square-mile area bisecting the Panama Canal.23 The Canal Zone’s civilian infrastructure included houses, commissaries, clubhouses, theatres, libraries, medical clinics, and schools to support thousands of US citizens and West Indian Panamanian employees of the Panama Canal. US citizens lived in the Canal Zone rent-free (Figure 2.1).24 The Panama Canal was dwarfed by the Canal Zone’s US military components: the Canal occupied only 3.6 percent of the Canal Zone’s terrain, while 68 percent was devoted to military uses.25 The US military presence in the Canal Zone also dated to 1904 but expanded signifcantly during World War II. Thereafter, the focus changed, from preparing US troops for war to training Latin American soldiers and serving as the nerve center of the US military in the region during the Cold War.26 In 1979, the civilian Canal Zone was dissolved, and the Zone was

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FIGURE 2.1

Map of the Panama Canal Area, showing lands reverted by the Torrijos-Carter Treaties.

Source: Courtesy of the American Canals Society.

transferred piecemeal to Panama’s government over the following twenty years. The turn of the millennium marked the end of the handover, as the entirety of the former Canal Zone came under Panamanian sovereignty. The transfer was guided by the Panama Canal Handover Treaties (sometimes called the TorrijosCarter Treaties), signed by General Omar Torrijos Herrera and US president Jimmy Carter in 1977. Omar Torrijos is an especially important fgure in this history. After taking power in a 1968 coup, Torrijos became one of Panama’s most enduring fgures, viewed by many in the country as a benevolent leader. Torrijos captured national adulation in part through his successful campaign to reclaim the Canal Zone.

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Many in Panama remember him fondly for this and other reasons: he unrolled public services, housing programs, and support for the arts. But critics note that Torrijos ruled undemocratically, disappeared and killed opponents, and stifed dissent, while his economic policies did not enact substantial wealth redistribution.27 Raúl Leis was a critic of both Torrijos and the US military; Leis authored several treatises on US Southern Command and the School of the Americas.28 These essays document the complicity of Panamanian political and military elites with the US military occupation—for example, in Panama’s National Guard taking courses at the School of the Americas. Leis noted the hypocrisy of Panama’s leaders in railing against the US presence in the Canal Zone while befriending US military ofcials and conducting joint feld exercises with US soldiers. Utilizing center-periphery theory, Leis argued that the Canal Zone mediated between the Pentagon’s center and Latin American military satellites, sowing an “international division of military labor” whereby Latin American armies executed mass violence, doing the “dirty work” of waging dirty wars at the behest of the United States.29 For Leis, imperialism had been succeeded by “Pentagonism,” the militarization of the world to secure US capital interests.30 Leis conducted research on US-Panama relations for a Jesuit-founded think tank established as the Center for Research on Social Actions (CIAS), then renamed the Panamanian Center for Research and Social Action (CEASPA). This think tank funded critical social research and published the journal that Leis edited for a decade (1976 to 1986) Diálogo Social (Social Dialogue). Under Leis’s editorship, the journal tracked disappearances, torture, and dirty wars across the Western Hemisphere, as well issues of racial justice, labor rights, and Indigenous rights. The journal placed Panama within a larger context of violence and anti-Communist counterinsurgency warfare taking place in the region. In these and other writings, Leis argued against violence as a response to neocolonialism. His pacifsm put him at odds with many on the Left, who accepted the necessity of violence for revolution.31 Leis lambasted Panama’s militarism, even as Torrijos and many of his followers condoned violence as necessary for the reclamation of Panama’s sovereignty. Leis also spoke out against dictatorship, including Torrijos’s dictablanda (soft dictatorship) and Noriega’s brutal authoritarianism.32 As his widow, Mariela Leis de Arce, recounted to me, CEASPA conducted a “systematic analysis” of institutional politics in Panama, and the two military dictatorships’ co-optation of oppositional groups—students, Indigenous peoples’ congresses, Panama’s Communist Party, and others.33 For these critiques, Leis was ostracized by Torrijos and punished by the Noriega regime.34 For Leis, theatre, critical scholarship, and activism were not separate realms; each informed the others, as he told me in a 2010 interview.35 Leis’s theatrical output showcases his continual query about how to be a committed intellectual and artist in Panama—a place intimately tied to US imperialism, neoliberalism, and militarism. Leis became captivated by theatre after attending a production of Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich at the age of 18.36 His fascination with

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theatre for social change led him to apply theatrical practices to grassroots popular education, developing and coordinating Voluntary Theatre for Social Change (TEVOCASO) in the mid-1960s. This branch of Panama’s National Volunteer Service (SVN) program sent theatre troupes into marginalized communities.37 In 1973, Leis published his Guide to a Popular Theatre, a handbook of theatre for social change based on experiences in Voluntary Theatre for Social Change that outlined the methods of sociodrama and socially conscious puppet theatre. The Guide begins with a pronouncement on Panamanians’ cultural alienation, stemming from Leis’s readings of Marxist, anti-colonial, and critical theory. While Leis’s sources and writing often evince a masculinist cast, the guide is attuned to questions of class and race, foregrounding Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, and poor peoples’ folkways. The introduction is both manifesto and glossary; Leis defnes the terms of his inquiry before providing concrete models of engaged community theatre. The manifesto oscillates between a general focus on the region and the globe (citing universal humanism, for example) and a localized examination of Panama as shaped by the Canal Zone’s “colonial enclave.”38 The Zone serves as a key example of how US cultural imperialism imprints itself upon Latin America and the Caribbean. Leis notes that what is happening on the isthmus, while specifc to Panamanian society, is also epochal, and that these structures—imperialism, capitalist exploitation, “Pentagonism,” and cultural domination—happen everywhere. For Leis, Panama is a testing ground for theatre of social change as a tool of liberation. The Guide defends the arts as necessary for revolution and radical change, since through them the masses can throw of the colonizer’s culture and undo the alienation that keeps them subordinate.39 Panama’s culture has been “deform[ed]” by the Canal Zone, and Leis glosses the term “cultural revolution” as a means of combating this “cultural domination” and “cultural invasion.”40 Leis also examines “cultural alienation,” a variant of Marxian alienation describing the “colonized man” dispossessed of land, history, work, and culture.41 The guide’s introduction identifes Panama’s multiple forms of alienation— the marginalization of poor, Afro-descendant, and Indigenous peoples within the national citizenry, as well as elites’ self-alienation in their obsession with foreign values and products. Theatre can help guide people toward Freirean “disalienation,” a nonviolent process that allows one to re-encounter themself and enter into dialogue with others.42 This occurs through theatre’s capacity to examine a situation from diferent perspectives, through dramaturgical abstraction and the mediation of actors or puppets. Quoting Fanon, Leis fnds a central role for theatre in furthering a national culture based on a mediated interpretation of folk traditions, thereby contributing to national liberation.43 As a form of culture that will shape a new public, theatre must be “popular, realistic, critical, and free” (popular, realista, crítico, y libre).44 “Popular” entails deepened forms of expression comprehensible to the masses; “realistic” means depicting the system of social relationships undergirding community problems and attending to misery and exploitation; to be “critical” is to perceive causes of

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social malaise and propose options through dialogue; and “free” entails openness to formal experimentation and structural changes in the production process.45 The goal of this Brechtian-inspired theatre is both to entertain and to be an instrument of analysis, motivation, and consciousness-raising, to allow participants to become “subjects of their own histories.”46 Leis lays out in detail how actors go about making community theatre, using his past practices of making theatre with Afro-Panamanians and Guna Indigenous peoples as a guide. He advocates “sociodrama,” which he defnes as theatre that enacts localized social problems. The process is complex and delicate, because the theatre company must enter a community respectfully and engage with the townspeople reciprocally, in order to foster a truly pedagogical participation. The townspeople can enter into any part of the creation process, including choosing a theme, acting, and writing the script—but Leis notes that they may express fear, insecurity, and hostility to the company’s presence. He provides ways to mitigate opposition if this arises, in particular through liaising with an existing “base community” (comunidad de base) whose leaders can act as intermediaries—a relationship that he views as vital to the resulting production’s success.47 Leis provides many practical exercises to create conscientization and cohesion among the group selected to produce the play, long before the actual dramaturgical labor begins. He proposes simplifed Stanislavskian acting methods; abstraction is not the goal here. In connecting with the community at large, the theatre troupe must take care to remember that theatre is a means, not an end; that their work should integrate itself as seamlessly as possible with projects already underway in the community; and that their production should not have an undue impact on the community, so as not to “frustrate” participants. Rather, they must work within the bounds of the feasible, in the community’s ongoing vicissitudes.48 The work of creating the play begins with the actors interviewing community members and taking notes, which they compile into a feld diary. Out of this come observations, questions, and themes. The collected notes are condensed into keywords, like “fre” and “harvest,” that are central to the community’s interests. In scripting the drama, the company will fgure out possibilities for plots, fnd central conficts, enact these in improvisational vignettes (both funny and serious), select some to script into a larger whole, and create an innovative way to conclude. Throughout the rehearsals, which Leis calls prácticas rather than ensayos, the actors must be in dialogue with the community to ensure legibility. That is, the rehearsals are not hidden away but are in fact part of the overarching production. When the play is ready to be given a formal presentation to the community, it must be accompanied by a forum with the audience. Afterward, the production’s participants must complete a survey or questionnaire that will serve as a record of the event. Following his multi-step elaboration, Leis afrms that creating community theatre is “no utopia” and, quoting Brecht, that theatre necessitates constant experimentation.49 In subsequent chapters he provides concrete excerpts of this

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theatre from his feldwork. One example teaches us to create a simple puppet theatre that will allow community members to safely voice concerns that they would not be able to discuss were they not obscured by the puppet’s “mask.” Another blends a children’s folktale with political pedagogy. These practical observations break down theatre-making into intricate microprocesses of dialogue, to address problems at their roots and sow consciousness and confdence. The ideas and techniques in the handbook exemplify theatre that seeks to decolonize, through a messy, experimental logistics that nonetheless fulflls pedagogical aims. Leis used many ideas expounded in the Guide to a Popular Theatre in his dramaturgical output from the 1970s to his sudden death in 2011. The same year that Leis published the Guide, he premiered Journey to Salvation and Other Countries (1973), his frst play, for which he won the Ricardo Miró prize, Panama’s highest honor. In one scene of this hilarious, deeply critical play, the protagonist, a poor person named Librado Mancilla, sneaks across the barbedwire fence separating Panama from the Canal Zone. Mancilla is casing the Zone as a spy, aiming to form an insurgent Poor People’s Army that will unite the marginalized underclasses in a collective, violent overthrow of the rich and powerful. Mancilla isn’t the savviest insurgent, though, and soon he is caught and tied up by US soldiers. When their sergeant, the cheekily named Bob Klan, approaches him and aggressively asks why he’s there, Mancilla replies, “I’m here to get some guns.” In a Brechtian swerve, this answer pacifes Sgt. Klan, who turns cheerful and replies, Guns! You want guns. Well, that changes things. Boys! (The soldiers release him). We’ve got everything. (Slaps him on the back. All types of guns are projected in rapid succession in the background. The sound of bombs falling.) We have the most varied sizes and models. Well, depending on the number of people you want to kill… (43) When Mancilla notes that he has no money, Sgt. Klan adds that some weapons can be provided free of charge, no problem. But then Mancilla goes too far, as he always does: he adds that he’s from Dark Corner (Rincón Oscuro), a shantytown, and would like to live better and have justice. At the word “justice” Klan does an abrupt about-face: BOB: Stop! If you want that… That stuf about justice and freedom. No guns for

you! Absolutely not. That would be the last straw. The last straw! It could lead to communism. SOLDIERS: (Frantically running around. They shout) Communism! The Russians! Socialism! The Chinese! Watch out! Watch out! (In chorus) Fire. Take your LSD. Kill your neighbor. Communism! (44)

The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis 39

As the scene continues, Leis moves from this satire of the US military selling and leasing weapons to Latin American militaries into a critique of US cultural hegemony in Panama. Following the parody of anti-Communist hysteria is a cabaret-style song in which the soldiers laud the “American way of life.”50 Sergeant Klan boasts, “The United States is the cradle, the bed, and the tomb of democracy. Actually, we’re not a democracy, but Paradise.”51 The soldiers run around frantically, brandishing oversized Coca-Cola bottles, cigarettes, hotdogs, and TV antennae like weapons, while their leader barks, “Do you want to free yourselves from this? Or do you love it?” They repeat together “Or do you love it!” (45) blending military discipline with a choreography of hegemony. The satirical, Brechtian sequence encapsulates the ways that the US military seduces its Latin American pupils in the Canal Zone. The scene is purposefully absurd and excessive, even as it relays Leis’s sociological research into the Canal Zone’s militarization. Journey to Salvation and Other Countries does not stop at lambasting the military Canal Zone but critiques multiple institutions, focusing on Panama’s context while using allegory and symbolism to generalize societal ills. In a series of episodes equally Swiftian and Brechtian, Mancilla visits the pompous country of the intelligentsia; the hypocritical, corrupt realm of the Catholic Church; the world of fnance and development; and the political elites and bureaucratic government functionaries. He also lampoons sociologists who come to the town to collect data and spy on the people, objectifying the latter as experimental case studies. When Mancilla returns to Dark Corner, he has failed to gather intelligence for the Poor People’s Army, and his encounters with hegemonic powers have sapped him of the will to fght on. Leis frames Mancilla as a comically failed revolutionary, too caught up in intellectual minutiae and grandiose schemes to focus on the logistical microprocesses of preparing the grounds for social change. But in Mancilla’s absence, the people in his neighborhood have formed working groups inspired by his rallying cry. They want to launch the popular armed resistance, and their collective desire eventually empowers Librado to lead the uprising. The play, like many of Leis’s works, ends without a conclusion: the Poor People’s Army, we learn, has attacked the centers of power, and the police and military are preparing a punitive response. The actors break character and ask the audience how the play should end. “Did we give in? Did they massacre us? Did we gain any advantages? Did we change society?”52 In Boalian for(u)m, the actors lead the audience in a conversation about what might happen. Leis chooses to end the play with one character singing a hopeful song: “We shall have to open the future like a door and force our way into the promised land. A vital, new society…” As Mariela Leis de Arce told me, Leis’s plays rarely culminate in pure critique or negative dialectic. In the sense of propuesta, no protesta (proposal, not protest), Leis’s plays present the possibility of moving beyond the problematics depicted within them. After Journey to Salvation and Other Countries, Leis embarked on an ambitious playwriting career that engaged a range of topics, integrating sociological research and political views. Leis won the Miró drama prize four times, and all of his plays received at least one production.53 Spatial constraints prevent me from discussing

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the entire oeuvre, but I will briefy describe four plays: Here Comes the Sun with His War-Hat On (1976); María Picana (1979); Mundunción, or the Arsonist’s Curse (1988); and The Bridge (2000). These plays, taken together, demonstrate Leis’s theatrical approach to creating revisionist histories that combat state-sponsored violence, neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and coloniality of power, and that imagine possible futures centering Indigenous rights, Afro-mythopoetics, and the dialectics that undergird alternative social worlds. Moreover, in staging these plays, Leis privileged community actors; his early plays featured some of the only Black actors on Panama’s stages at the time, and they were performed in community venues, including in marginalized sites like Colón. Here Comes the Sun treats the history of the Panama Railroad, and its connection to one of the frst US military interventions in Latin America: the “Watermelon Slice” incident of 1856. This violent clash occurred when a US citizen en route to the California goldmines via the Panama Railroad stole a slice of watermelon from a Panamanian vendor, triggering an uprising that resulted in over a dozen deaths, widespread destruction, and an international diplomatic incident that marks Panamanian history to the present. Leis frames the railroad as one of the frst multinational corporations in Latin America: a US company that ran through Panama and extracted profts from locals, endangering their livelihoods and lives. Governing elites took shelter on US warships during the incident, and Leis lambastes these elites along with the US government. The play is a dynamic intertext, interlayered with “historical references, popular songs, and Guna Indigenous cantos.”54 These include an entr’acte featuring a Guna ceremonial chant to the Sun God that also retells the history of Panama from its pre-Conquest days to the 1970s. Following the main plot, Leis stages an extended metatheatrical, participatory interaction with the audience that links the Panama Railroad to the Canal Zone, critiquing the Zone through a game that the actors play. This fnal scene features projections, alienation devices, and Boalian exercises, as well as a critique of the School of the Americas and its role in the ousting of Chilean president Salvador Allende.55 Throughout Here Comes the Sun, Leis connects the past to contemporary aspects of US imperialism. In Act 2, Scene 3, for example, Leis includes an international journalist (a purposeful anachronism, a technique that he employs often), whose coverage of the incident showcases the latent racism, classism, and blurring of nuance of international reporting. Leis embeds anachronistic references to the CIA, the Vietnam War, and (anti)communism throughout the play.56 Reference is also made to contemporary poverty in Panama and the events of January 9, 1964— the deadly confict between the US and Panama in the Canal Zone that inspired the push for the Canal Handover Treaties. In creating this satirical, Brechtian, and multilayered play embedded with contemporary references, Leis demonstrates the relevance of history to the present and the interrelation of US multinational corporations (like the Panama Railroad Company) and US military power. Here Comes the Sun was written during one of the most violent periods in Latin America’s Cold War, and Leis gestures to this regional violence in María

The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis 41

Picana. María Picana is set in “House 501,” a clandestine torture camp located in an unnamed Latin American country similar to those utilized by Southern Cone dictatorships. The plot incorporates Leis’s interest in theatre as a laboratory or social experiment, along similar lines to Brecht’s Lehrstücke.57 While the play features a Pygmalion-esque social experiment, it also experiments with the audience, leaving spectators to decide what might come of its proto-Bildungsroman and romance subplots (both ruses, as it turns out). The title character, “Maria Stun Gun” (María Picana), is a foundling raised by the administrator of the concentration camp to be a torturing machine. The play asks why humans commit brutal acts against each other, linking US and Latin American militaries explicitly. The grotesque Nazi-inspired torturer purchases his implements from Mr. Smith, an American weapons salesman who celebrates Hitler as “in vogue” again.58 In addition to the Nazi caricature, Leis includes a morally anxious and self-excusing doctor whose role is to make sure that the torture victims are still alive, and a lower-class executioner who carries out brutal tortures and voices resentment of the squeamish elites who are complicit with the torture campaign but avoid taking part in it themselves. Finally, he includes a queer, commedia dell’arte-esque servant who absorbs the cruelty of the others. With these characters, Leis shows that no group—the international business class, middle- and lower-class strata, and the scientifc and medical community—is exempt from complicity with violence. He also takes aim at the business and bureaucracy of violence: the torturers ask their superiors for higher wages, with a bonus if the prisoner confesses.59 Made an administrator of the torture house, María spouts corporate jargon: she strives for maximum productivity and efcacious results. When she infltrates the prisoners’ networks, the play tempts us with the possibility that her lifelong indoctrination in torture—the training protocol that has formed her—might be undone. But it also complicates our desire for this possibility, and its overarching premises, in an absurd and confusing culmination. In contrast to María Picana, Mundunción is a work of documentary theatre that reassesses Panama’s national history in light of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and radical Christianity. The play incorporates primary sources to retell the history of the famous fre that burnt Leis’s hometown, Colón, in 1885, allegedly set by Pedro Prestán, an Afro-descendant Liberal rebel who led an uprising against Colombian leader Rafael Nuñez, a US ally.60 In the preface, Leis credits the infuences of Erwin Piscator, Brecht, Peter Weiss, Pedro Bravo Elizondo, and documentary plays across Latin America (including by Jorge Adoum, Manuel Arce, Yuyachkani, the Popular Theatre of Bogota, Panama’s experimental theatre group Los Trashumantes, and Panamanian playwright José de Jesus “Chuchú” Martinez). Leis frames the history through an unsympathetic narrator, Melquíades Quintero, who leads us through his former neighborhood, now destroyed by a fre. Lacing his speech with crude jokes and epithets, Melquíades enacts a casually misogynistic and homophobic cruelty. But we realize that he is in fact alienated: he blames himself for being poor and does not see the reasons for his poverty, which are his political disenfranchisement and the expropriation of the land by

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elite landlords. He tells us about the Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples who formerly resided in his building (a metaphor for urban Panama) and have since been displaced. Rather than see eviction as a tool of dispossession, to clear an urban slum and ready the lot for sale, he blames the “curse of Pedro Prestán,” pinning the neighborhood’s demise on the ghost of the Black rebel. In the course of the play, Melquíades’s rationale will be undermined and fnally unraveled by his dialectical counterpart, a congo performer who calls himself Mundunción.61 The congos of Panama are an African diasporic community residing, among other places, in the town of Portobelo, and descended from the slaves of the Spanish.62 The community has retained rich traditions of language and performance, including an annual ritual ceremony involving complex, multilayered dance, song, and mythology that takes place from late January to Ash Wednesday. In this opening sequence, the neighborhood and its multiracial inhabitants constitute a microcosm of Panama. The ritual inversions and dialectical thought of the diablos congos enable a retelling of the story of the nation’s history, within networks of economic, political, and military domination. In so doing, the congos raise the consciousness of the contemporary urbanites. The play interweaves the story of Prestán with the diasporic cosmology of the congos, syncretic Christianity, folk riddles, and language play. Its dialectical relationship forces us to question the underlying racist and colonial implications of blaming the burning of Colón (and fres since) on Prestán, in folk legend and “common sense.” In fact, Leis draws upon soldiers’ recorded testimonies to show that the US military (called in to break up Prestán’s siege) in fact set fre to the city of Colón and blamed the rebel leader, executing him after an unfair trial. Again, Leis places his dramatization of Panama’s national history within an international context of foreign economic domination, colonial intervention, antiblackness, and a continuous landholders’ campaign against poor people, who have internalized racism in reiterating the Prestán curse to cope with their precarity. Leis reafrms his allegiance to his hometown of Colón, “that burned city. […] [T]he city of Blacks, of chombos, of the Indian mestizos, of the Chinese, the outcasts, the foreigners.”63 Unlike the other plays discussed above, Mundunción does not end with a participatory forum but rather with the congo characters joining Melquíades to form new relationships, as he transcends his disdain for them and realizes the forces of injustice that keep him entrenched in poverty. In protagonizing the congos, Leis creates one of his most strongly decolonial plays: their dialectics subvert the coloniality of power that oppresses Melquíades and his neighbors and introduces a new aesthesis, language, and epistemology. While they are at times unwieldy and digressive, Raúl Leis’s plays present a fascinating interweave of utopian desires, communitarian impulses, archival research, and ethnographic and sociological data. In keeping with Leis’s investment in Latin America’s “New Theatre,” they strive for a participatory dialogue with audiences that is, ideally, linked to consciousness-raising and “rehearsal [for] revolution.”64 They also expound liberation and decolonial thinking, enriched by the theorization of resistant Latin American theorists and practitioners of the day.

The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis 43

They draw upon Leis’s close work with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, and his own socially marginalized upbringing and Afro-descendant roots, to anchor themselves in Panamanian themes and forms and ofer intriguing skeleton keys to liberation struggles in Latin America and throughout the so-called Third World.65 Whereas María Picana was written during Leis’s involvement with the Sandinistas, Mundunción must be situated against a backdrop of the destruction wrought across Central America by US militarization and neocolonialism. After Torrijos’s death in 1981 and Ronald Reagan’s triumph over Jimmy Carter’s softer foreign policy approach, the US turned away from a platform of détente. The signing of the Handover Treaties was followed by violent anti-Communist counterinsurgencies in the 1980s, segueing into the Drug War in the 1990s. President George H.W. Bush’s brutal invasion of Panama in 1989 brought in 24,000 troops—the largest US military force deployed since Vietnam—and destroyed Panama’s infrastructure and society, killing thousands.66 The consequences of this retribution continue to roil the country. Leis’s anatomies of imperialism, racism, classism, and settler colonialism shed light on the local conditions of Panama within global circuits of neocolonialism and coloniality. Because he understood that the ills plaguing Panama were more complex than its lack of sovereignty over the Canal Zone—nationalists’ primary issue, shepherded into an institutional framework in part by Torrijos— he continued addressing these problematics in his theatre during and after the Canal’s handover in 1999. Leis won the Miró Prize once more for his play The Bridge (El Puente) in 2000. The play explores many themes—including sexual abuse, poverty, labor, and suicide—while also examining what happens “after” the Canal has become Panamanian. The two protagonists, Joaquín and Rosalba, create a dialectic through their debates about the post-imperial moment. Joaquín asks Rosalba if she feels pride that the Canal is now “hers.” Rosalba responds that she doesn’t feel that it belongs to her, or to “us,” because of the country’s concentration of wealth in few hands, and the political corruption that will prevent its profts from fowing to the people. Joaquín, on the other hand, is more sanguine, despite being chronically unemployed. Their dialogue lands neither on cynicism nor naïve optimism, and they end up in a synthesis of sorts. As in many of Leis’s plays, the characters represent historical positions; they are both individuals and collective conditions of trauma and hope. I was fortunate to attend a production of the last play that Raúl Leis wrote, Free of Fear (Curados de espanto) in 2010, at the Panama Canal Authority’s auditorium in the former Canal Zone. The play addressed the child labor haunting Panama’s cityscapes and included a forum in which we “voted” with colored notecards, refecting on our encounters with child labor and child poverty. The forum was intended to make visible the “ghostly” crisis unfolding around us, and I continue to think about the accessible and at times humorous techniques through which Leis unveiled this (in)visible labor.67 In our interview before the show, Leis stated that Panamanians still needed ideological, pedagogical theatre

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for social change. While many have opined that this didactic, heavy-handed, and often propagandistic form of theatre no longer resonates (if it ever did), or that it has been instrumentalized by the “Theatre for Development” industry, Leis disagreed. He felt that the Canal’s handover had efectively “de-ideologized” many people, but in fact there was even greater need for social justice in a post-handover society with a booming economy, fssured by some of the starkest income inequality in Latin America, and a militarized police force. In some ways, the Canal’s handover frustrated Panamanians’ attempts to interrogate their histories, as its neat break between imperial past and sovereign future expunged traces of the US occupation. In his newspaper columns, Leis commented on many problems lingering after the handover: the misuse of the Canal Zone’s reverted lands; unexamined legacies of dictatorships; and the emerging local movement to excavate the complex twentieth-century history of the isthmus. Currently, this movement is gaining ground, as evidenced by a recent exhibition and roundtable series at Panama’s Museum of Contemporary Art about the 1989 Invasion, “Los cuatro tiempos de la invasión” (December 20 to March 1, 2020), and the creation of a museum at former Fort Clayton about the US military in the Canal Zone.68 Yet the Canal Zone’s reverted lands are now privatized and far beyond the reach of most Panamanians, and many view the former Canal Zone as even more exclusionary than under US colonialism. Many more conficts remain to be addressed. While Panama has had an ofcial democracy since the invasion, Leis and many others diagnosed the coloniality of power working behind the political façade in post-invasion national politics.69 I wonder if Leis, who died in 2011, would have become cynical about recent developments, or if he would have continued to seek grassroots change. Certainly, he would have continued his theatrical labor, knowing that the work was never over, and there were so many more ways to remake the world.

Notes 1 Among his many other writings, Leis coauthored a notable book on the future of the Canal Zone’s reverted lands and published a white paper about Panama’s political future based on interviews across the country. See Raúl Leis and Jesús Q. A lemancia, Reversión canalera: informe de un desafîo (Panamá: CEASPA, 1995), and Movimiento Papa Egoró (MPE), “Una Sola Casa: Aportes Para un Programa Nacional del Gobierno del Acuerdo y el Compromiso entre Panameños” (Panamá, 1992). “Una Sola Casa” is contained in Rubén Blades Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University. Series 4, Political Campaign Materials. See also Leis’s selected columns for Nueva Sociedad here: https://nuso.org/autor/raul-leis-r/. Accessed October 1, 2020. 2 See Katherine Zien, “Sounding Sovereignty: Performance and Politics in the 1999 Panama Canal Handover.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 21, no. 4 (August 2014): 337–353. MPE sought to launch a new approach to Panamanian society and politics in the wake of the 1989 US invasion to oust Noriega, and Panama’s subsequent political crisis. Although the movement was short-lived, it secured a strong following among Panamanians seeking an alternative to the predominating two-party system. MPE insisted that the party known to many Panamanians as anti-colonial—the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD)—was also the party of two successive dictatorships, human rights violations, and (c)overt assistance to US military colonizers.

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3 For a fulsome discussion of colonialism, see Neil ten Kortenaar, “Delhi/Ahmednagar Fort – Washington, DC/Birmingham Jail – Pretoria/Robben Island 1947–1994; or, Race, Colonialism, Postcolonialism,” in Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully, A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory (New York: Wiley, 2017), 115–128. Imperialism is often confated with colonialism, but some scholars associate imperialism more with the creation of imperial subjects—that is, with subjectivity—and colonialism more with the brute conquest of economic resources and terrain (I am indebted to Monica Popescu and Sandeep Banerjee for this insight). Settler colonialism, as theorized by Patrick Wolfe and others, refers to the conquest of land and material resources outside of a state structure, and often at an individual level. Latin American nations are rarely framed as settler colonies, unlike the United States and Canada, but as Shannon Speed notes, they share the same structures and therefore should be. See Shannon Speed, “Structures of Settler Colonialism in Abya Yala.” American Quarterly 69.4 (December 2017): 783–790. As Patrick Wolfe notes, settler colonialism “entails conquering the land and then populating the conquered territory with the victorious people.” Cited in Christopher A. Loperena, “Settler Violence?: Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras.” American Quarterly 69.4 (December 2017): 801. 4 See Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965). 5 Quoted in Martha Herrera-Lasso Gonzalez and Kimberly Skye Richards, “‘CAVCA Buries BIACI:’ Activating Decolonial Tools in Cartagena de Indias,” in Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas, eds. Natalie Alvarez, Claudette Lauzon, and Keren Zaiontz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 231. 6 The counter-term to coloniality of power is decoloniality or decolonial thinking, which ofers a means of addressing coloniality at its most capillary levels, in addition to dismantling the larger institutional forces that perpetuate colonial hierarchies. 7 For more information on the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Non-Aligned Movement, and other Third World coalitions, see Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu, and Katherine Zien, Introduction to The Cultural Cold War and the Global South (New York: Routledge, 2021). One of the actions of Castro’s Cuba was to extend these Afro-Asian solidarities to Latin America by way of the concept of Tricontinentalism. See Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 8 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 539. See also Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal 134 (1992): 549–557, and Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” in Robert Rhodes, Imperialism and Underdevelopment (New York: New Press, 1970). Anibal Quijano notes that Immanuel Wallerstein’s “modern world-system” is based on Prebisch’s theory and the “Marxian concept of world capitalism,” and the very processes of material modernity that we experience today, fowing from this world-system, cannot be grasped without our acknowledgment of a place-based origin point for these systems: the New World (“Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 540). 9 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 539. 10 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 533. 11 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 533. 12 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 535. 13 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 534. 14 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 567. 15 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 568. 16 Diana Taylor, Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 4. Taylor quotes Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 34. 17 See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire:

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18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31

Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). In Theatre of Crisis, Taylor acknowledges modernity and the coloniality of power by describing how uses of spectacle changed from the pre-Conquest Indigenous peoples to the Conquerors (1–7). Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1997). See Taylor’s brilliant illumination of the complexity of “New Theatre” and Latin America’s Cold War in Theatre of Crisis, 39–51. Taylor poses a trenchant critique of “New Theatre” in Theatre of Crisis (see 17–18). I concur with Taylor’s implicit assertion that this didactic theatre is not necessarily aesthetically innovative or politically efcacious, but I feel that as an epiphenomenon of the Cold War era it is important to chronicle and understand as a network of actors or a social movement. Indeed, at times Taylor’s critique perhaps unintentionally emulates modernist critical pushback against theatre deemed too clunky, heavy-handed, amateurish, or “uninteresting.” I fnd it important to reassess this supposedly uninteresting theatre, because if we accept the inherent instability of the theatrical medium, as Taylor notes, then we must acknowledge that such didactic theatre may have resonated with some audiences. For information on these and other contemporaneous theatre groups, see Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend, Stages of Confict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 541. For studies addressing US–Panama relations, see Marixa Lasso, Erased; the Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Katherine Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017); Michael Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Michael Connif, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). During World War II, the US occupied additional sites outside of the Canal Zone for military training and defense, which it was forced to return to Panama due to popular outrage. West Indians were forced to pay high rents for substandard, racially segregated housing. Raúl Leis and Herasto Reyes, “Escuela de las Américas: entrenamiento y control.” Diálogo Social no. 87–88 (febrero–marzo 1977), 51. Note: regarding successive US military commands in the Canal Zone, see Katherine Zien, “Mises-en-Scène of Militarization: Decommissioning U.S. Military Infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone,” in Performance in a Militarized Culture, eds. Lindsey Mantoan and Sara Brady ( New York: Routledge, 2017), 18. See Carlos Guevara Mann, Ilegitimidad y hegemonía: una interpretación histórica del militarismo panameño (Panamá: Editorial La Prensa, 1994); R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sánchez Borbón, In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). See, for example, Raúl Leis, Comando Sur: poder hostil (Panamá: CEASPA, 1985); Leis and Reyes, “Escuela de las Américas,” 50–56. Leis, “Escuela de las Américas,” 50. Leis, “Escuela de las Américas,” 51. Leis credits this concept to Dominican politician, artist, and scholar Juan Bosch. Indeed, as Taylor notes in Theatre of Crisis, a “nonviolent revolution” seems like a contradiction in terms. Leis’s commitment to pacifsm did not stop him from joining the Sandinistas, but he focused primarily on coordinating the national literacy campaign alongside Nicaraguan poet, priest, and culture minister Ernesto Cardenal,

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32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

who became his close friend. In lambasting violence, Leis noted that the US had established Panama’s military. Interview with Mariela Leis de Arce, January 14, 2019. Interview with Mariela Leis de Arce. Interview with Mariela Leis de Arce. Mariela Leis de Arce commented that after Leis had spoken out against Noriega publicly in Diálogo Social—marking one of the few critical public voices before the US Invasion—Noriega’s police forcibly confscated CEASPA’s printing press and infrastructure for publication and removed Leis from his position as journal editor. After Noriega’s ouster, Leis started another journal, Este país, but this did not have sufcient support in the post-Invasion landscape and so folded within a few years. Interview with Raúl Leis, April 28, 2010. For additional coverage of Leis’s life and work, see “Raúl Leis: la política en la mente,” Revista panameña de política ( July– December 2006): 9–24; Katherine Zien, “Panamanian Theatre for Social Change: Notes from an Interview with Playwright Raúl Leis.” Latin American Theatre Review 47, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 5–12. José Carr, “Por Colón no se pasa impunemente.” Tragaluz 26 (de noviembre de 2000), 9. José Carr, “Por Colón no se pasa impunemente,” 9. Raúl Leis, Guía para un teatro popular (Panamá: [s.n.], 1973), 5. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 10. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 3–6. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 6. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 10. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 10. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 12. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 12. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 14. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 22–23. Comunidades de base are also a key focus of liberation theology and Freirean popular education; see Adam Versenyi, Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture from Cortés to the 1980s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 153–167. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 23. Leis, Guía para un teatro popular, 30–31. Song lyrics: We’re imperialists, we don’t hide it We dominate the world, the American dream. How great it is to be the boss, the head honcho In many little countries, banana republics; Countries with oil, countries where we do deals and make money, But the most important thing is what we export. (Bob alone) Dress like us, talk like us, Read like us, drink like us. Think like us, do like us! And someday you’ll be like us! (Chorus) Glorious America! Of large capital cities! Of sex and beautiful violence All full of blood, orgies and machines Beautiful North America, free, white, and powerful! Today we sing to you! From our beautiful bombs of Vietnam. The fne yellow color of napalm. Oh gorgeous Sixth Fleet! Illustrious Pentagon!

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Today we sing to you! Let’s export your essence to the rhythm of chewing gum Our way of living, the “Way of Life” Our dominant economy Long live our magnifcent self-interest! 51 Raul Leis, Viaje a la salvación y otros países (INCUDE, Panama, 1974), 44. 52 Leis, Viaje a la salvación y otros países, 91. 53 Productions have taken place at world festivals like La Muestra Mundial de Teatro in 1977 and the Floral Games of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala (1980); in Mexico; Colombia; Chicago; Spain; and across Panama. 54 Viene el sol con su sombrero de combate puesto, Prologue. 55 Leis, Viene el sol con su sombrero de combate puesto, published in Revista Lotería, 338–339 (mayo–junio 1984): 171–173. 56 There is a funny moment in Act 2, Scene 4 in which an elite passenger tells his boatman that something is “pure communism,” and another peasant retorts, “That’s not a thing yet.” 57 On Brecht’s interest in theatre as a site of experimentation, see Fredric Jameson, B recht and Method (New York: Verso, 1998), 60–64. 58 Raul Leis, María Picana (Panama: Ediciones Aspan Pipigua, 1980), 18. This dialogue also refers to Operation Paperclip, the contracting of Nazi technocrats by the US government following World War II. 59 Leis, María Picana, 31–32. 60 For historical context on Prestán’s rebellion and hanging, see www.laestrella.com.pa/ opinion/columnistas/100819/125-anos-pedro-ahorcamiento. Accessed September 29, 2020. 61 “Mundunción” is a congo inversion of the word “curse” (maldición). 62 For an excellent treatment of the bailes congos, see Renee Alexander Craft, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015). 63 Mundunción Act 2, Scene 8. Chombo is a racial slur for a West Indian-descended Panamanian. 64 Augusto Boal, “Excerpts from Theatre of the Oppressed,” in Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, ed. Daniel Gerould (New York: Applause, 2003), 472. 65 While the concept of the Third World is not entirely felicitous, it describes a h istorical world condition. Whereas the “Global South” concept emerged after the Cold War, the Third World (tiers monde) concept held sway for many decades after being coined by Left French intellectual Alfred Sauvy in 1952. The Third World, with echoes of the “Third Estate,” indicated a kind of “global proletariat” that was “other, diferent, independent, and sovereign” and demanded “freedom, equality, and brotherhood” (Marcin Wojciech Solarz, “‘Third World’: The 60th Anniversary of a Concept that Changed History.” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 9 (2012): 1565). Problems with the Third World concept, echoed in the Global South, include the territorializing of dispersed inequalities, and the assumptions about teleological (and implicitly Eurocentric) modernity that are bound up in the hierarchy of three worlds, or the North-South binary. 66 Connif, Black Labor on a White Canal, 154–167. 67 See Zien, “Panamanian Theatre for Social Change,” 9. 68 On the exhibition, see www.ellas.pa/estilo-vida/cultura/los-cuatro-t iempos-de-lainvasion-en-el-mac/; the museum’s website is https://ciudaddelsaber.org/conocela-historia/centro-de-interpretacion/. Accessed September 29, 2020. 69 In particular, critics noted that the government of Guillermo Endara, which had won the 1989 election that Noriega didn’t recognize, was sworn in on a US military base in the Canal Zone.

3 ABSURDIST THEATRE GOES POSTCOLONIAL Trans-Contextuality, Absurd Jokes, and Evocation in (Post)colonial Plays Mina Kyounghye Kwon

Immediately after World War II, a group of European playwrights (including Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco, and ex-prisoner playwright Jean Genet), mostly living in France as outsiders, produced plays that were soon categorized as the Theatre of the Absurd by theatre scholar Martin Esslin.1 The Theatre of the Absurd, although it was not a conscious movement declared by these playwrights, was the most prominent avant-garde theatre genre of the 1950s and 1960s.2 Scholars generally agree that absurdist theatre grew out of the postwar zeitgeist, responding to the atrocity and human cruelty of World War II and/or expressing an outsider’s perspective on language and social structures.3 The 1950s and 1960s also ushered in the era of decolonization, during which many nations in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean gained independence.4 In the following decades, especially the 1970s, marked by Edward Said’s seminal publication of Orientalism in 1978, many postcolonial5 and Indigenous6 cultures began to engage in the process of self-determination. As this essay will illustrate, the emergence of playwrights in these (post)colonial7 regions coincided with the post-World War II heyday of absurdism as the premier avant-garde theatre genre. In addition to the historical convergence, both absurdist playwrights and certain postcolonial playwrights engaged comparable sentiments, such as alienation, displacement, and absurdity, largely owing to World War II and colonial legacies, respectively. In other words, during this period, certain (post)colonial “outsiders” outside/inside (former) empires engaged intentionally or unintentionally with the absurdist aesthetics of European “outsiders” within empires. Focusing on the intersection of absurdist theatre and (post)colonial theatre, this essay examines three notable playwrights from cultural locations that underwent distinct colonial relations: Nigeria, Korea,8 and Native America. Nigeria belongs to a classic colonial/postcolonial model with a British colonial center.

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Since the annexation of Lagos in 1861, the British expanded its colonial rule over diferent parts of what is now Nigeria,9 amalgamating the Nigerian territories in 1914.10 The British colonial regime in Nigeria ended in 1960. Korea, which endured Japanese colonialism and its legacy, is an unexpected case for many Euro-American scholars but one that pushes the boundaries of eurocentrism even within postcolonial studies. Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. Native North America is signifcant in that Indigenous people in this region, subject to European colonialism that began in 1492, continue to fght colonial/ imperial forces on their lands, reclaiming their history and rights.11 Ola Rotimi, Oh Taesuk,12 and Hanay Geiogamah are all prominent playwrights and directors, and their works, such as Rotimi’s Holding Talks (1970), Oh’s A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge (1970), and Geiogamah’s Body Indian (1972), have been associated with absurdist theatre by critics and/or by the playwrights themselves. At the same time, all three playwrights are also known for their creative uses of indigenous aesthetics (local, historical, literary, and/or performative)—the mode of cultural recuperation (which I have described as “glocal-local”13 elsewhere) that characterizes much of (post)colonial theatre. Although each playwright has been explored individually, their post-empire transnational connections have not yet been examined. Inspired by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s concept of “minor transnationalism” (i.e., lateral international minority alliances),14 this paper draws colonized-to-colonized connections, illuminating the specifc manifestations of what I would call “trans-contextuality” (i.e., comparable or even analogous cross-cultural contexts) and “absurd jokes” (i.e., mockery or self-mockery in a theatrical context, producing unsettling feelings in the audience), a concept I originally developed elsewhere15 and re-introduce in this essay. In so doing, this essay engages in critical conversations about theatre and politics, cultural and aesthetic syncretism, historical circumstances and individual playwrights’ agencies, global/local studies, and transnationalism.

Nigerian Waiting for Godot: Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks and Post-Independence Disillusionment The theatre of Ola Rotimi, one of Nigeria’s most popular dramatists and theatre directors, has been noted for its wide appeal to varied Nigerian local audiences. Rotimi, born to a Yoruba father and an Ijaw mother, said in an interview that he feels “fortunate […] to claim heritage to […] Ijaw, Yoruba, Sierra-Leone, [and] Ghana backgrounds,” which helped him to encompass in his works the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Nigeria beyond his immediate Yoruban local cultural environment.16 Born in 1938 in Sapele, a town that “still retained aspects of traditional African life,” Rotimi was familiar with “street parties, dancing, and masquerade theatres,” but he grew up receiving formal education in Euro-American institutions.17 According to him, although he belongs to a particular generation that “had been conditioned by Euro-Western upbringing,”18

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he realized the importance of his varied traditional African heritages when he began interviewing traditional priests as a research fellow in drama at the University of Ife in Nigeria after returning from the United States in 1966.19 Rotimi’s plays, such as Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again (1966), The Gods Are Not to Blame (1968), Kurunmi (1969), Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (1971), and If: A Tragedy of the Ruled (1983), show a strong sense of history (either addressing Nigeria’s past history or more contemporary historical and socio-political issues) and draw on indigenous Nigerian theatre aesthetics, involving traditional music and dance. In the context of Rotimi’s oeuvre, Holding Talks (premiered in 1970, published in 1979, and written in English), although it still engages with Nigeria’s socio-political issues, stands out as an anomaly because it is devoid of indigenous oral narrative and performative components. Instead, it consciously borrows the style and motifs of absurdist theatre. Chinyere G. Okafor explains that some of Rotimi’s audience members were “surprised and even disappointed when they [did] not fnd [usual] theatrical elements in his plays.”20 Okafor continues to write that [a]lthough the Port Harcourt audience enjoyed the production of Holding Talks in 1979, a few admitted that it was not what they expected from Rotimi because of the absence of the type of music, dance, and crowds that are the usual features of his plays.21 In this self-consciously absurdist play, the main confict and other aspects of the play generate a strong sense of ridiculousness, going along with Martin Esslin’s articulation of the absurd. In The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin combines the conventional defnition of absurd as “out of harmony with reason or propriety” and Albert Camus’s philosophical notion of the absurd that stems from the condition “when [people] are faced with ‘the image of what [they] are’” or from “man’s own inhumanity.”22 The main confict of the play stems from something trivial and groundless, which then gets blown out of proportion. The character Man, “afuently attired,”23 has come to a barbershop for a haircut, and he claims that the hand of the character called Barber was shaking when he was beginning to comb his hair, which Barber denies. Man leads Barber to bet ten pence on this “controversial truth”; Barber is told to re-enact the same action and freeze at the same arm position as before for ten seconds. During the paused moment, Barber’s hand trembles visibly (as many people’s hands would in that unnatural situation), so the already impoverished Barber loses his ten pence. Barber then prepares to cut Man’s hair to compensate for the money he lost, but having been malnourished for so long, he suddenly “sags to the foor,”24 leaving the audience to question whether he is dead or not. Even after Barber’s fall, although Apprentice Barber attempts to take the collapsed barber to the hospital, Man engages the apprentice in a series of arguments and talks, mostly involving solipsistic and sermonic stories. Toward the end of the play, Policewoman arrives to investigate the situation, but Man distracts her in a similar manner, wasting her time.

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Policewoman storms out in frustration without saving Barber. Man and Apprentice Barber resume talking. This “all talk no action” theme in the play is presented along with signifers of nothingness and impasse, evoking Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with the use of such symbolic props as the fan, the newspaper, and the radio. When Man comes to the barbershop, he frst asks Apprentice Barber to turn on the fan. When the apprentice turns on the fan, “everybody looks in that direction, expecting results.”25 However, no matter what speed the apprentice selects, “the revolution remains at the same rate: slow, defant, indolent,”26 except the funny noises on the maximum setting. The newspaper and the radio convey similar meanings of social impasse. When the frst scene opens, Apprentice Barber, having “nothing to do,” is “leafng through the pages of some tattered newspapers,” and the newspapers “report on TALKS—all species of TALKS: national, international, continental, intercontinental.”27 Similarly, the radio in the barbershop “blares out the news”28: RADIO: ‘In the Ethiopian Capital of Addis Ababa, the Organization of

African Unity today discussed …’ [a shrill squeak] ‘European Common Market Ministers are meeting in Brussels to discuss …’ [a clucking sound] ‘In Washington, the American and British Heads of State continue high level talks on…’ [a howl] ‘Socialist Party leaders throughout the world are arriving in Moscow for a fve-day conference at which they will discuss …’ [a bable (sic)] ‘And in New York, an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council has been scheduled tonight to discuss…’ [croaking sound] ‘That’s the end of this news broadcast coming to you from the…’ …29 In his production notes, Rotimi reveals that he wrote this play as “a reaction to a growing preference of our Age for talking even in the face of situations demanding action and obvious solutions.”30 The radio news quoted above clarifes that the play satirizes the inefective activities of the OAU, European Common Market Ministers, American and British politicians, Socialist Party leaders, and the UN Security Council. In my essay, “Absurd Jokers,” I developed the concept of “absurd jokes,” based on the theatrical components of “joke-work”—the frst person (the joker), the second person (the butt, or target, of the joke), and the third person (the audience)— in Freud’s theory of jokes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.31 Departing from Freud’s theory, I argued that unsettling sentiments in many absurdist plays have a lot to do with the presence of “absurd jokes,” which are structured differently from the ordinary jokes that, Freud explains, work because of the three separate components and because of the audience’s alliance with the joker but not with the butt of the joke. As I theorized, unlike ordinary jokes, “absurd jokes” are words, ideas, stories, or embodiments that establish the confation of  the joke’s butt and the joke’s audience (creating mockery of the audience)

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and/or the confation of all three components (creating self-mockery) in a theatrical setting that requires an audience.32 In other words, “absurd jokes can be briefy defned as mockery and/or self-mockery in a theatrical context, producing unsettling feelings in the joke’s audience”33 and “absurd jokes … can be a powerful dramatic/theatrical technique to question the existing power structure”34 or the status quo. Regarding Rotimi’s play, the butts of the play’s jokes are not likely to be the direct audience members themselves; however, the play still functions as mockery in a theatrical context in its larger satirical “audience,” especially when it comes to Rotimi’s criticism of Nigerian and other African national leaders. The self-important, afuent, and exploitative Man in Rotimi’s play stands in for the Nigerian and other African national leaders in the postcolonial era. In his critical essay, Rotimi discusses his generation’s hope in the era immediately following independence and moves on to explain a strong sense of disillusionment: … Then came the reality … It came directly from the least expected source: the leadership in the land. And like some insatiable curse, the disillusionment has persisted to this day, even getting worse in places like Nigeria … A majority of the rulers of the newly independent country—began to falter or simply to abnegate the principle of nationalist struggle outright.35 Criticizing African national leaders, Rotimi connects post-independence disillusionment to absurdist theatre: Confusion pervaded the land as former “brothers in the struggle” against colonialism turned into conjurers of old hatreds to propel their own ambitions for power. National development fossilized and was heartily supplanted by a syndrome of rabid self-enrichment commingled with the jingoism of tribal interests. With some groups it has been a doggedness to hold on to power in perpetuity, daring the intervention of counteractions that are bound to culminate in a holocaust—as was the case in Liberia, Sudan, Somalia, and, more lately, Rwanda. The result is a classic example of Absurd Drama—a drama that refects a world, a nation, a society that ofers no sense, expects no logic, despises reason, and begrudges hope.36 Here, Rotimi must be referring to the deferred democracy in Nigeria with military rule, which lasted from 1966 until 1999, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), and particularly the military government’s non-distribution to its people of the profts from the 1970s oil boom. As Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton write, “[t]he geographical area now known as Nigeria was created by the British colonial administration in 1914, not by indigenous peoples themselves.”37 Even after the formation of “Nigeria,” most people’s lives “centered on local communities that had existed” for centuries,38 and Nigeria struggled to develop “a unifed national consciousness.”39 Falola and Heaton state that by 1970, “Nigeria’s stability and prestige had been greatly damaged

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by a decade of political corruption, economic underdevelopment, and military coups,” culminating in the civil war.40 The “discovery of petroleum in commercial quantities in the Niger delta in 1958” did make Nigeria “the wealthiest country in Africa during the 1970s,” but this wealth was “distributed unequally, beneftting primarily those people who had access to state power.”41 Alluding to these situations, the play functions as a satire of Nigeria’s post-independence impasse and the national and international leaders responsible for the disillusionment. Rotimi also notes that the metaphorical styles of absurdist theatre appeal to authors who do not have guaranteed freedom of expression. He writes that [a third world playwright would devise] ways of venting his angst through plays that employ the riddle of metaphors [because] this way he increases his chances of staying alive and out of detention so that he can continue to ‘talk’ with his people about the anguish of their common predicament.42 Certainly, Rotimi’s characters, rendered as types (Man, Barber, Apprentice Barber, Blind Beggar, Boy Beggar, Press Photographer, and Policewoman), are allegorical, and there is a particular resemblance between Beckett’s Pozzo and Rotimi’s Man. Like Pozzo, a soi-disant benevolent “humanist” and “philanthropist” who simultaneously abuses his servant Lucky, Man in Holding Talks self-aggrandizes at the expense of the collapsed barber. Both Pozzo and Man exploit the most underprivileged while regarding themselves as intellectually and ethically superior to others, although Pozzo employs an arguably more sophisticated rhetoric of ostensible humility through his (insincere) practice of self-refection and self-doubts. Within the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, however, they both represent the master fgure that desires to consume the other for their own self-certainty. Julie Sanders distinguishes adaptation from appropriation, explaining that adaptation is “frequently involved in ofering commentary on a source text,” which is “achieved most often by ofering a revised point of view from the ‘original,’ adding hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and marginalized.”43 Appropriation, on the other hand, “does not always make its founding relationships and interrelationships as clear … with named, embedded texts”44; therefore, the “gesture towards the source text(s) can be wholly more shadowy  …”45 Based on Sanders’s distinction, Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks is closer to an appropriation than an adaptation because his play is not intended to give commentary on the “source text,” and the source text (though arguably Waiting for Godot) is not clearly specifed, despite Rotimi’s reference to absurdist drama. Patrick Ebewo specifes the following local references: Barber ‘ceremoniously whets the razor on the palm of his hand’—favourite practice of Nigerian local barbers[;] ‘anatomical jokes’ common among Nigerian touts with ‘dirty minds’[;] reference to ‘white afara,’ cheap lumber stock, and involvement of street beggars and boy-guards.46

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Considering Ebewo’s local references and the playwright’s inspiration for his play from the trans-contextuality between Nigerian postcolonial realities and European absurdist drama, Holding Talks can be called a Nigerian glocal (global + local) appropriation of Waiting for Godot. Whereas Beckett’s Estragon says “Nothing to be done,” Rotimi comments on the back cover of the published play that “[in] this play, nothing really gets done.” Unlike “nothing to be done,” which emphasizes helplessness, futility, or resignation, “nothing really gets done” indicates that there is actually a lot that should be done. Given this diference in tone, Rotimi’s play arguably functions as a more overt call for action than Beckett’s play. Holding Talks, inspired by European absurdist theatre, with particular connection to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, creates fresh ties with the playwright’s national, continental, and possibly global sites.

The Nation-State in Non Sequitur: South Korea in the 1970s through Oh Taesuk’s A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge47 The frst absurdist play to be staged in Korea was Ionesco’s La Leçon (The Lesson) (1951) produced by Theatre Group Silheom Geukjang (Experimental Theatre) in 1960, which was followed by numerous small Korean theatre groups staging Western existentialist and absurdist plays in the 1960s and 1970s.48 In addition to the numerous productions of Euro-American absurdist plays, many Korean plays showing absurdist elements were published in the late 1960s and 1970s. Oh Taesuk, one of the most prolifc playwrights/directors in South Korea, who is known for centering his theatre on Korean indigenous literary and performative components, made this notable shift to indigenous aesthetics (the glocal-local mode of syncretism) from the 1970s.49 Before this shift, however, many of his early plays in the 1960s and 1970s were associated with absurdist theatre, including Weding Deureseu [Wedding Dress] (1967); Hwanjeolgi [Change of Season] (1968); Yeowang-gwa Giseung [The Queen and the Strange Monk] (1969); Yudayeo, Dagi Ulgijeone [ Judas, before the Rooster Crows] (1969); Gyohang (1969); Yukgyowiui Yumocha [A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge] (1970).50 Granted, Oh himself denies any direct infuence of absurdist theatre. Instead, he attributes the absurdist elements to his “perfunctory” incorporation of Ionesco, his use of the “indirect” and “roundabout” Korean indigenous mode of communication as in kkokdugaksi noreum (Korean traditional puppetry), and his earlier obsession with the “limits of communication,” explaining that the main theme in his early plays is alienation.51 Based on Sanders’s ideas (introduced in the earlier section), Oh’s early plays can be neither adaptations nor appropriations. Oh does not make any commentaries on the “source texts,” and there are no clearly associated source texts, whereas Rotimi’s Holding Talks shows a strong resemblance to Waiting for Godot. As Sanders suggests, “adaptations and appropriations are [frequently] impacted upon by movements in, and readings produced by, the theoretical and intellectual arena as much as by their so-called sources.”52 In other words, despite Oh’s denial, the trans-contextuality between the sentiment of alienation and

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nausea of post-World War II Europe and the atmosphere of anxiety, alienation, and illogicality of the recently decolonized and rapidly industrializing South Korea of the 1960s and 1970s—along with the global popularity of absurdist theatre (as evidenced by Oh’s familiarity with Ionesco, hence also a bit of intertextuality here)—must have contributed to Oh’s early plays. When it comes to those who dissociate themselves from a specifc genre or do not clarify any conscious aesthetic borrowing, I suggest “evocation” as an alternative term to describe an aesthetic syncretism, which can be employed, regardless of authorial intention. Among Oh’s early plays, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge, written in Korean53 and premiered in 1970, is noteworthy as a play that evokes absurdist elements while satirizing a range of South Korean socio-political problems of the time. Like Rotimi’s play, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge also makes use of a character simply called “Man.” It begins with Man, wearing a whistle, with a doll in a baby stroller on a raised platform that we soon fnd out stands for an urban overbridge. The breaking news soon flls the stage, announcing that the Ministry of Health and Welfare orders all babies and toddlers under age three to be taken outside for at least two hours a day to prevent a contagious life-threatening skin disease. The news continues, reporting how this “emergency order to which all citizens must oblige” is created to “ensure the health of the children and the long-term continuation of the nation-state,”54 and hence introducing the play’s ludicrous premise. Man’s seemingly illogical comments, often in non-sequiturs, contribute to the play’s satire of South Korean postcolonial realities in the 1970s. In the 1970s, South Korea was in the Third Republic (1963–1972) phase of the Park Chung Hee administration. Park seized power frst via a military coup in 1961, and after running South Korea for the frst two years “under an emergency junta,”55 he was elected president in 1963 with the extensive involvement of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), which Park created under his rule in 1961.56 After his second presidential term, Park amended the constitution to allow himself to run for a third term, and in the end, he established a new constitution that granted the president immense power with no limits on re-election.57 Law and order at the whim of the powerful, and Park’s authoritarian regime which lasted until his assassination in 1979, provide the essential climate for Oh’s play. At the beginning of the play, Man sings an enigmatic song to console his baby who starts crying when a nearby car comes to a screeching halt: Ah, baby I am daddy. Ah, daddy you are baby. Peekaboo, baby you are daddy. Peekaboo, daddy you are baby.58 Namseok Kim interprets this song as “Man’s unconscious wish to live like a baby” because babies are unaware of the hard reality of having to “try to survive in a difcult society.”59 I would add that this song also symbolizes the South

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Korean society of the 1970s in which militaristic measures and cultures rendered law and order, as well as the corollary social roles, random and absurd. In Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea, Carter J. Eckert demonstrates that “the most formative infuences in Park’s approach to governing” were the culture and practices of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), especially as taught and inculcated in the IJA’s premier ofcer training schools of Japan and Manchuria, from which Park Chung Hee and many of the early ROKA ofcers had graduated.60 Eckert further argues that the military disciplines—largely, legacies of Japanese colonialism, though not unconnected to Korean culture in the late nineteenth century—were central to South Korean “economic development and nation building” during Park’s rule. Eckert adds that the army culture can still be found in “virtually every … sphere of social activity, as well as in many facets of everyday Korean life.”61 In other words, the topsy-turvy social climate symbolized by Man’s song in Oh’s play is indicative of Park’s authoritarian style, inherited largely from his military training from the former Japanese empire. In this play, Man’s lines also expose social issues for ordinary citizens during Park Chung Hee’s militaristic modernization period. As Eckert points out, Park Chung Hee, a controversial fgure, is often seen as either a remarkable leader who enabled the “greatest socioeconomic transformation in [Korea’s] recorded history” or a dictatorial leader who increased “political oppression and social inequity.”62 During his terms, Park implemented the Five-Year Economic Development Plans, propelling rapid economic development and industrialization. However, with these rapid changes, new societal issues also emerged, such as double-income family structures without adequate childcare. Man explains that as a two-income family he and his wife have decided to take turns taking their baby outside in a stroller. Not being afuent enough to own a large backyard, Man had to resort to coming out to the middle of the road in Seoul, fnding the top of an overbridge a little safer. Apparently, Man is not alone in this situation, as there is currently, according to Man, a deluge of people with baby strollers on every road and in every corner of Seoul. Man responds to an imaginary audience member: “Oh, you mean, I should go to the Seoul Stadium? (pause.) Read the newspaper, please. It’s closed. The city locked the stadium to protect its lawns.”63 He also adds that someone he knows got “six trafc tickets” just trying to go to the Seoul Stadium.64 These details reveal the grievances of ordinary citizens having to deal with trafc issues, lack of leisure space, over-crowding, and their quality of life being casually sacrifced for the city or the nation-state’s more prioritized causes. Beyond everyday issues, the play accentuates the nation-state’s exercise of its power through arbitrary laws and panopticon-style surveillance. At one point, Man mentions the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s alternative idea, which is to create a national nap-time so that people with children can go outside more freely,

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while others rest at home, thereby reducing the trafc for several hours a day. Man counter-argues, saying that paralyzing Seoul like that would lower the Gross National Product (GNP) and economic productivity. Soon, he quickly blows the whistle around his neck and responds to the invisible but omnipresent government: “I am sorry? Okay, I understand. I will be more careful. All right, I understand that my topic violated the national security law.”65 In this one-person play, Man plays all roles and initiates key sound cues. He turns on a cassette tape player to start the breaking news segments and blows the whistle approximately fve times during the play to signal the government’s constant checking and warnings. In Man’s multiple roles, the fact that he is blowing the whistle he was wearing symbolizes the extent to which citizens have internalized, or have become self-conscious about, the government’s surveillance and control, through such apparatuses as censorship, martial law, emergency orders, the National Security Act,66 and the KCIA, often in the name of national security and anti-communism.67 The ludicrousness of the play’s situation goes one step further when Man brings up the government’s new way of helping busy working couples during the mandated children-under-three outside time. The government developed a large stroller-daycare in which multiple babies and toddlers can ride. This program’s seats are all sold out and “standing room only” spots are currently available. Man confdes to the audience that he could not bear to leave his baby standing up in that special stroller-daycare. This preposterous scenario underscores the contradiction and hypocrisy of the government that claims to ensure the well-being of the nation’s children but, in efect, neglects/abuses its most vulnerable members. At the end of the play, the breaking news announces that the emergency order has been canceled because it is counter-productive for people’s hygiene, the nation’s economy, and city trafc. It also announces that the whole thing turned out to be a fraud by a stroller company in collaboration with a member of the Ministry. Upon this news, Man holds his baby (a doll) upside down and delivers his last line: “I knew the whole thing was a fraud. That’s why I brought a doll instead of my real child. Please ask yourself. If I brought my real child here, do you think the play’s meaning would be diferent?”68 In this way, Man turns the government’s joke on the citizens back on the government, indicating that although ordinary citizens may obey the rules, they may not have faith in their government. Further, Man’s last question suggests that there may be no diference between the fctional play the audience members have just seen and the socio-political reality in which they live. When Oh decided to write this play after receiving a request to create a theatrical piece for a party organized by a high-ranking politician, he wanted to refect the social climate of the time.69 Given that Oh’s play was originally envisioned to include the high-ranking politician in the audience, and given the ways in which Man turns the government’s joke back on the government, Oh’s play works as an absurd joke that mocks part of the audience and the society at large and questions South Korean socio-political realities of the 1970s. Although Oh did not borrow absurdist theatre styles consciously, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge evokes absurdist theatre in its use of non-sequiturs,

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wordplay, and “absurd jokes,” owing to its trans-contextuality. Yonho Suh states that the existential philosophy and absurdist outlook were well matched with a Korean psyche that had just endured a series of national traumas.70 Miy-he Kim also connects the vigor of Western absurdist theatre in the Korea of the 1960s and 1970s to absurdist plays’ latent political energy during the authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in South Korea. Echoing Rotimi’s use of absurd theatre’s metaphors, Kim writes that, through covertly allegorized political signifers, absurdist plays ofered “catharsis” to South Koreans who did not have enough freedom to express their thoughts on politics.71

Tragicomedy and Native America in Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian In Native North America, the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of what Kenneth Lincoln and subsequent scholars call a “Native American Renaissance,” marking the beginning of a major new wave of American Indian literary voices. Jaye T. Darby also writes that “[t]he 1960s and 1970s in the United States saw the rise of American Indian activism, sometimes called the Red Power movement, as Native activists pushed for increased rights, tribal sovereignty, and self-determination.” 72 In the feld of Native American theatre, also, a series of groundbreaking events took place in the 1970s. Hanay Geiogamah formed the American Indian Theatre Ensemble (later renamed the Native American Theater Ensemble) in 1972, which sparked the foundation of other American Indian theatre companies, such as the Navajo-Land Outdoor Theatre in 1973, Spiderwoman Theatre in 1975, and the Red Earth Performing Arts Company in 1974.73 These theatre companies were created to stage plays and performances mainly for American Indians, by American Indians, and about American Indians. Hanay Geiogamah—a Native American74 (Kiowa and Delaware) playwright, director, flm producer, and UCLA theatre professor—pioneered Native American theatre by forming the aforementioned theatre company75 and later the American Indian Dance Theatre, and also publishing American Indian plays. As Jefrey Huntsman writes, although Native Americans have long expressed their cultures through various performative forms of “song, poetry, prose, painting, and sculpture,” Geiogamah was among the frst to write a play—a “European literary form that was new to Indian artists.” 76 According to Huntsman, Geiogamah did not just adopt this new form but broke new ground by “present[ing] Native Americans to Native Americans” without “the more pernicious of the Euro-American stereotypes of Indians.” 77 Geiogamah’s plays Body Indian (1972), Foghorn (1973), and 49 (1975) were published in New Native American Drama (1980), and some of his other plays, Coon Cons Coyote (1973), Grandma (1984), and Grandpa (1984) appeared in Stories of Our Way (1999). While Native American social issues, Indigenous aesthetics, and humor run through all of Geiogamah’s plays, Body Indian, which depicts Native American realities of injustice, poverty, and communal discord of the 1970s, is most

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comparable to absurdist theatre with its tragicomic and satirical potential. Body Indian, written in English, debuted at the American Indian Theater Ensemble in New York. It was also performed at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, and other venues across the US as well as in Berlin, Germany.78 Although Geiogamah did not write Body Indian to be intentionally absurdist, he has expressed his inclination toward absurdist playwrights. Annamaria Pinazzi, based on her interview with the playwright in 1988, writes, “As for European drama, Geiogamah himself declares his preferences, confessing his predilection for authors who have focused on the absurdity of the human condition, among others, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet, and Weiss.” 79 Geiogamah’s expressed afnity for absurdist theatre is noteworthy especially in comparison to his reservation about the Brechtian infuence on his plays. In response to Brechtian elements, Geiogamah, who studied Brecht’s theories briefy, “maintains that what he may have in common with the German author is just a generic and instinctive afnity in theatre practice, but he certainly would not subscribe to Brecht’s alienation theory, which he felt was ‘corny’.”80 Reminiscent of absurdist plays in minimalist settings, which turn into sites of nightmare and menace (e.g., a country road with a tree in Waiting for Godot and a basement room in The Dumb Waiter), Body Indian unfolds in the shabby one-room apartment of Howard (Bobby’s Indian “uncle”). The play describes Howard’s apartment as having “a large old-fashioned bed” with “dingy” “mattress and loose coverings,” and another “small mattress on the foor,” along with the “greasy” and “messy” kitchenette. Importantly, “many empty liquor bottles” of “all cheap wine brands” are “lying around the foor.”81 When the main character Bobby (an alcoholic in his thirties with an artifcial leg) arrives at this apartment, the audience learns that Howard, Ethel (Howard’s girlfriend), Thompson (Bobby’s friend), and Eulahlah (Thompson’s wife) have already been drinking for several days. Geiogamah writes in his “Author’s Note” that “[i]t is important that the acting nowhere is conducive to the mistaken idea that this play is primarily a study of the problem of Indian alcoholism.”82 Instead, alcoholism, as “a disease that has disproportionately plagued Native Americans since early European settlers used alcohol as an item of trade,”83 serves as a metaphor for the legacies of Euro-American colonialism in the Native American communities and Native Americans’ self-destructive ways of coping with various forms of historical injustices and cultural issues. For example, as Darby points out, the play exposes the aftermath of the allotment of Native lands in … the state of Oklahoma, and the breakdown of tribal values in its depiction of contemporary struggles with poverty and alcoholism and the evocation of traditional kinship obligations within the community.84 Evoking canonical absurdist plays’ repetitive and circular structures, Bobby passes out or is led by other characters to pass out in each scene, and when he is

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unconscious, Bobby’s relatives and friends roll Bobby’s body and steal any hidden money to buy more wine for themselves, even though many of them know Bobby wants to use his lease money to go to a rehabilitation center. Throughout the play’s fve scenes, this kind of exploitation of the disabled Bobby by other American Indians continues, whether from the older generation or younger generation, and men or women. At the end of each scene, the train whistle, or the railroad track projections, or both, interrupt the character(s), creating brief tableaus (often overlapping with the Native American percussion of the drum and rattles in the background). Like alcoholism in the play, the sound and image of a train are not just a reminder of how Bobby lost his leg on a railroad when he was drunk, but also a reminder of Euro-American colonialism—a symbolic representation of “European modernity, the soulless culture that has terrorized the Native American population as it displaced them from their homelands.”85 Although the play shows the link between Euro-American colonial legacies and the abject realities that threaten the internal cohesion and unity of Native American communities, it also emphasizes the community’s future direction. Toward the end of the play, when Bobby wakes up and realizes that his friends and relatives have stolen not only all of his money but also his artifcial leg to pawn, he puts on a “sardonic smile” and talks to himself, repeating what his friend Thompson said to him at the beginning: BOBBY: Welll, he—ell—o, Bobby Lee. How are you, hites? Lo—ng time no…

seee. He reaches for his crutches, has trouble securing them. Sitting upright on the edge of the bed, he looks straight ahead at a fashing train light, an entirely diferent mood about him now as horror overtakes him.86 As “Author’s Note” shows, “hites” is an American Indian term for “a close friend, usually male, like a brother but not related by blood.”87 When Bobby repeats Thompson’s earlier greeting, the irony of the word “hites” and the greeting itself is unmistakable. Where are the true hites, if all his friends and relatives take advantage of him, and what is he doing in this apartment, drinking his life away? Bobby’s “sardonic smile,” his ironic greeting to himself, and his sense of impending horror upon his realization of the brutal reality match a specifc type of “absurd jokes”—i.e., self-mockery in a theatrical context, in which we see the confation of the joker, the butt of the joke, and the joke’s audience. As I stated in “Absurd Jokers,” “[s]elf-awakening to and self-refection on the absurdity of one’s current (dishonest, hypocritical, inhuman, etc.) condition is a signifcant political move.”88 Clearly, this kind of tragicomic realization is the frst step to breaking away from the paralyzing status quo. According to Kenneth Lincoln’s MELUS interview, Geiogamah initially thought he was staging a tragedy about American Indians taking advantage of one another, but after seeing his (American Indian) audience laughing all the way until the end of the play at the rehearsal, he came to recognize that his play is

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actually a tragicomedy. Geiogamah explains this as “Indian humor,” saying that humor sustained American Indians’ survival through many upheavals in the past and present because being able to laugh even in the darkest moments indicates one’s control of the situation. Likewise, Pinazzi writes that “[o]vercoming tragedy through humor—also a distinctive feature of the Theatre of the Absurd—is a means to gain control over experience and, at the same time, shows that control has been reached.”89 Geiogamah himself also makes trans-contextual points about the relationship between humor and tragedy, saying that “I’ve tried to experience all kinds of humor, you know, black humor, sardonic humor, Jewish humor. It’s all basically the same thing—touching on survival.”90 Geiogamah’s view here is also comparable to that of Oh Taesuk, who says The Korean people have survived many difcult periods, partly through their sense of humour [sic]… Without that, life is very painful…. [F]or Koreans [the classical form] is comedy. I often incorporate this into my productions… Comedy is the Korean way of seeing life.91 Geiogamah’s use of tragicomedy, along with his general preference for absurdist theatre, supports how trans-contextuality and the use of “absurd jokes” may have contributed to the afnity between Body Indian and absurdist theatre. Geiogamah’s interest in community healing and re-building, indicated through the tragicomedy in Body Indian, manifests more clearly in his other works, including his play 49, which draws largely on American Indian tribal music, chants, ceremonies, and shamanic culture, as well as contemporary American Indian youth culture, such as powwow and 49 celebrations. Geiogamah writes that while American Indian tribes’ daily performances such as “music, dance, religious ceremonies, tribal commemorations, [and] seasonal observances” were in a “deep […] hibernation,” having been “banned and outlawed along with tribal languages near the end of the nineteenth century,” there have been eforts to “reawaken” tribal voices from the late 1940s.92 Such eforts were further fueled by the “strong move towards pan-Indianism” in the late 1960s, a period that marked notable American Indian political activist events—e.g., the pan-tribal American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in 1968, the occupation of Alcatraz Island by the Indians of All Tribes (1969), the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Afairs in Washington, DC (1972), and the occupation of Wounded Knee (1973).93 These and many other examples of pan-Indian activism show Native Americans’ desire for self-determination—the desire to take control of history, tribal cultures, and their past, present, and future collective memories and realities.

Conclusion I have thus far examined Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks (1970), Korean playwright Oh Taesuk’s A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge (1970), and Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian (1972). Both Rotimi’s play and Oh’s play satirize

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social inequalities and deferred democracy under the nation-states’ military or militaristic rule as well as other local and global socio-political concerns. Both plays make use of the allegorical character, “Man.” If Rotimi’s Man stands in for Nigerian/African national leaders, Oh’s Man embodies the vulnerable citizens of South Korea. Also, whereas Rotimi’s play focuses on the idea of social and political impasse, Oh’s play tackles the problems that result from the rapidly changing economy and social structures in conjunction with citizens’ restricted freedom. Both Rotimi and Oh makes use of what I call “absurd jokes” in the form of mockery in a theatrical context. However, Rotimi’s appropriation of absurdist theatre is more deliberate than Oh’s case of what I suggested as evocation, an alternative term for syncretism that can be used, regardless of authorial intention. Geiogamah’s play also evokes absurdist elements, especially metaphorical and tragicomic qualities, notably in the “self-mockery” type of “absurd jokes” to bring about the rebuilding of Native American communities. In the larger sense, all three plays arguably employ self-mockery, given that they all make a “mockery” of internal national problems (Nigerian, South Korean, and Native American)—the issues that are undoubtedly linked to colonial legacies from each respective colonial history (British, Japanese, and Euro-American colonialism). The surprising transnational connections among these three playwrights—in their works’ glocal evocation of absurdist theatre, their strong sense of history, their mix of tragic vision and humor, and glocal-local incorporation of indigenous literary/performative aesthetics in their careers—are not merely coincidental. I contend that these connections are results of the 1970s, a historical crossroads between the canonicity of absurd theatre and the emergence of postcolonial theatre. Further, these case studies show that (what might appear to be) intertextualities between absurdist theatre and postcolonial texts are formed not necessarily through the direct transfer from one author’s source text to another’s hypertext, but signifcantly through socio-political trans-contextualities, theatrical language in the form of “absurd jokes,” and use of metaphors and antirealism, as well as the intertextuality resulting from the unconscious absorption or “perfunctory” use of globally and locally available artistic options. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih identify two extreme paradigms of transnationalism and propose a third. On one end is the transnationalism from above… associated with the utopic views of globalization,… celebrat[ing] the overcoming of national and other boundaries for the constitution of a liberal global market, the hybridization of cultures, and the expansion of democracies and universal human rights. (6) On the other end, the “transnationalism from below,” associated with the “dystopic visions,” focuses on “such negative consequences as environmental and health hazards [and] ‘McDonaldization’ of cultures,” in which the local tends to be “romanticize[d] …” and seen as “stubbornly the site of resistance” (6). As

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in the spirit of “minor transnationalism” (the third, non-binary type of transnationalism that Lionnet and Shih propose), the local playwrights in this essay are agents of negotiation and navigation rather than those merely under the global top-down infuences or those simply resisting global factors in a bottom-up style. The perspective of lateral international minority alliances allows us to see the afnities between absurdist playwrights and certain (post)colonial playwrights, as well as the afnities among (post)colonial playwrights’ glocal and glocal-local navigations.

Notes 1 Brian Singleton, “Absurd, Theatre of the,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4–5. 2 “Absurd, Theatre of the,” 4–5. 3 “Absurd, Theatre of the,” 4–5. 4 For more details, see Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 5 When I use “postcolonial” without a hyphen, it means “postcolonial” as a theoretical concept, indicating the dual meaning of its prefx “post” (that is, the temporal “post” as in the post-liberation period and “post” referring to the engagement with the consequent legacies of colonialism). Rather than just focusing on resistance to colonialism, I consider the term “postcolonial” broadly as a concept that deals with the (formerly) colonized people’s way of coming to terms with a reality saturated with colonialism and its efects and envisioning an alternative self-determined future. The exclusive focus on resistance could potentially limit our understandings of postcolonial theatre to mainly that of “protest” or “resistance” theatre. Artworks from (formerly) colonized regions may envision a more self-determined future in diverse manners. 6 In this essay, “Indigenous” with the capital I is used to refer specifcally to the Indigenous cultures that never gained territorial independence but nonetheless engage in the process of self-determination. “indigenous” without the capital I is used to mean “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native” broadly. 7 When I use “(post)colonial” with parentheses, it is an intentional use to include both the nation-states that gained independence and the Indigenous cultures that never gained territorial independence but nonetheless engage in the process of self-determination. 8 In this essay, by “Korean” or “Korea,” I mean mostly South Korea, but I also use these terms to refer to the collective “Korean” culture before Korea was partitioned into two political states. 9 Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 85. 10 Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 110. 11 This essay treats these cases as notable (not comprehensive) examples, although the intersection between absurdist theatre and postcolonial theatre must go beyond these examples. 12 For Oh Taesuk, I follow the Korean name order of the last name followed by the frst name. Oh is his surname. However, all the other Korean names will follow the usual name order of the given name followed by the surname. 13 I suggested the concept of “glocal-local” (for the convenience of shorthand) to describe a mode of syncretism highly common in postcolonial and Indigenous theatre, referring to the “intersection of the global, the (contemporary) local, and the restored/ being-restored indigenous local cultures from the past” (77). See Kyounghye Kwon,

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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“The Hilarity of Unhappiness in Oh Tae-suk’s Tempest: Cross-Cultural Access and Precolonial/Indigenous Aesthetics.” Asian Theatre Journal 34.1 (Spring 2017): 75–96. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Kyounghye Kwon, “Absurd Jokers: Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett,” in Pinter Et Cetera, ed. Craig N. Owens (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 43–63. Chinyere G. Okafor, “Ola Rotimi: The Man, the Playwright, and the Producer on the Nigerian Theatre Scene,” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma (WLT) 64.1 (Winter 1990): 24–29. Okafor, “Ola Rotimi,” 24–29. Ola Rotimi, “Conditions in the Third World: A Playwright’s Soliloquy on His Experience,” in The Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile, ed. Kof Anyidoho (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 126. Falola and Heaton write that European education during the British colonial administration and afterward infuenced Nigerians to have “European tastes and values,” but many of them also “embraced their local African cultures.” See Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 128 and 130. Okafor, “Ola Rotimi,” 24–29. Okafor, “Ola Rotimi,” 24–29. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage, 2004), 23. Ola Rotimi, Holding Talks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1. Rotimi, Holding Talks, 9. Rotimi, Holding Talks, 2. Rotimi, Holding Talks, 2, my italics. Rotimi, Holding Talks, 1. Rotimi, Holding Talks, 32. Rotimi, Holding Talks, 32. Quoted in Okafor, “Ola Rotimi,” 24–29. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960). Freud makes a sharp distinction between the comic and jokes, saying that whereas the comic requires the frst (the self ) and second (the object of the comic) components only, “a joke … must be told to someone else” (176). Kwon, “Absurd Jokers,” 58. Kwon, “Absurd Jokers,” 60. Rotimi, “Conditions in the Third World,” 127. Rotimi, “Conditions in the Third World,” 128, my italics. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 158. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 158. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 159. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 159. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 181. Rotimi, “Conditions in the Third World,” 129, my italics. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2007), 19. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 32. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 32. Patrick Ebewo, “Holding Talks: Ola Rotimi and the Theatre of the Absurd.” Marang: Journal of Language and Literature 18 (2008): 157. In this Korean section, all translations from Korean-language sources are mine. Yonho Suh, 한국연극사:현대편 [The History of Contemporary Korean Theatre] (Seoul: Yeongeuk-gwa Ingan, 2005), 223. I have discussed this topic in more detail in my paper, “Shifting South Korean Theatre.” Suh, The History of Contemporary Korean Theatre, 45.

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51 Quoted in Jang, 36. See Won-Jae Jang, ed., 오태석 연극 실험과 도전의 40년 [Taesuk Oh’s Theatre: Forty Years of Experiment and Challenge] (Seoul: Yeongeuk-gwa Ingan, 2002). 52 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 13. 53 As far as I know, this play has not yet been translated into English or any other language. 54 Taesuk Oh, 육교위의 유모차 [A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge], 오태석 공연대본전 집 3 [The Collection of Oh Taesuk’s Plays 3], eds. Yon-ho Suh and Wonjae Jang (Seoul: Yeongeuk-gwa Ingan, 2003), 8. 55 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 350. 56 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 354. 57 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 356–363. 58 Oh, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge, 10. 59 Namseok Kim, “오태석 초기작에 나타난 혼란 양상과 그 의미 [The Confusing Patterns and Meanings of Oh Taesuk’s Early Plays],” in 오태석 공연대본전집 3 [The Collection of Oh Taesuk’s Plays 3], eds. Yon-ho Suh and Wonjae Jang (Seoul: Yeongeuk-gwa Ingan, 2003), 203. 60 Carter J. Eckert, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4. 61 Eckert, Park Chung Hee, 2. 62 Eckert, Park Chung Hee, 1. 63 Oh, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge, 11. 64 Oh, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge, 12. 65 Oh, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge, 13. 66 This law has been enforced since 1948. 67 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 351. 68 Oh, A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge, 18. 69 Quoted in Jang, 50. 70 Suh, The History of Contemporary Korean Theatre, 221–222. 71 Miy-he Kim, “부조리극 수용과 한국연극 [The Reception of the Theatre of the Absurd and Korean Theatre],” 한국연극의 쟁점과 새로운 탐구 [Korean Theatre’s Points at Issue and New Research], ed. Yon-ho Suh (Seoul: Yeongeuk-gwa Ingan, 2001), 25. 72 Jaye T. Darby, “‘People with Strong Hearts’: Staging Communitism in Hanay Geiogamah’s Plays Body Indian and 49,” in Native American Performance and Representation, ed. S.E. Wilmer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 155. 73 Hanay Geiogamah, “The New American Indian Theatre: An Introduction,” in American Indian Theatre in Performance: A Reader, eds. Hany Geiogamah and Jaye T Darby (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000), 161. 74 In this essay, I use “American Indian” and “Native American” interchangeably. 75 As Huntsman writes, Geiogamah organized the American Indian Theatre Ensemble in 1972 “with the help of Ellen Stewart, director … of LA Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York City” (xii). See Jefrey Huntsman, “Introduction,” in New Native American Drama: Three Plays by Hanay Geiogamah (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), ix–xxiv. 76 Huntsman, New Native American Drama, ix. 77 Huntsman, New Native American Drama, ix. 78 Huntsman, New Native American Drama, ii–xiii. 79 Annamaria Pinazzi, “The Theatre of Hanay Geiogamah,” in American Indian Theatre in Performance: A Reader, eds. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000), 187. 80 Pinazzi, “The Theatre of Hanay Geiogamah,” 187.

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81 Hanay Geiogamah, Body Indian. New Native American Drama: Three Plays by Hanay Geiogamah (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 6. 82 Geiogamah, Body Indian, 8. 83 Hideyuki Kasuga, “Native American Drama,” Critical Survey of Drama, eds. Carl Edmund Rollyson and Frank Northen Magill, 2nd ed. (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2003), 1–4. 84 Darby, “People with Strong Hearts,” 157. 85 Kasuga, “Native American Drama,” 1–4. 86 Geiogamah, Body Indian, 44. 87 Geiogamah, Body Indian, 7. 88 Kwon, “Absurd Jokers,” 61. 89 Pinazzi, “The Theatre of Hanay Geiogamah,” 189. 90 Kenneth Lincoln and Hanay Geiogamah, “MELUS Interview: Hanay Geiogamah.” MELUS 16, no. 3 (Fall 1989–1990): 80. 91 Quoted in “The Bard of Asia,” Herald Scotland, 7 August 2011.https://www. heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/13034191.the-bard-of-asia/ 92 Geiogamah, “The New American Indian Theatre,” 159. 93 Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 108–126.

4 HISTORY PLAYS Performing the Anti-Apartheid Movement on Contemporary South African Stages Gibson Alessandro Cima

South African history plays, such as Martin Koboekae’s Biko: Where the Soul Resides (2008), Aubrey Sekhabi’s Mantolo: The Tenth Step (2009), and Van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors (2014), ofer compelling case studies in understanding the post-empire moment through theatre. For South Africa, that moment arrived belatedly. After over 250 years of conquest and colonialism, including over a century as a possession of the British Empire, the advent of apartheid in 1948 delayed the country’s decolonial progress. When the system of legally sanctioned racial oppression ofcially ended with the April 1994 democratic elections, South African protest theatre artists demilitarized their practice. They radically reinvented the anti-apartheid theatre tradition into, frst, a celebration of their country’s political transition, and then, a stringent critique of the rhetoric of forgiveness surrounding that regime change. As the African National Congress (ANC)’s “talk left, walk right” policies failed to improve the majority of South Africans’ lives, theatre artists turned increasingly toward representing the past to the present, drawing a sharp contrast between the utopian promise of the struggle for freedom and the reality of democracy.1 This chapter examines three post-apartheid “history plays” as exemplars of theatre after empire: Biko, Mantolo, and Ancestors.2 These plays view the past two decades of South African democracy through the lens of the apartheid-era, highlighting divergences and continuities between the empire and the post-empire. Set entirely within the apartheid era, Koboekae’s Biko: Where the Soul Resides portrays Steve Biko, the martyred South African Students’ Organization president, as a brilliant but fawed leader.3 Bridging the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, Sekhabi’s Mantolo: The Tenth Step depicts the true story of Major Sibusiso Masuku who, like many other aging freedom fghters, feels abandoned by democracy. In Van Graan’s post-apartheid satire Return of the Ancestors, Biko and Afrikaner activist Neil Aggett—who also died in government detention—return

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to present-day South Africa to see if their sacrifces were justifed. I argue that Koboekae, Sekhabi, and Van Graan’s history plays engage in “embodied historiography.”4 They performatively rewrite dominant apartheid history narratives in order to critique the present. In his study of history plays, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, Freddie Rokem writes that “theatre can seduce us to believe that it is possible for the actor to become a witness for the now dead witnesses.”5 Actors in post-apartheid history plays, such as those discussed below, serve as witnesses to the past in the present. Koboekae, Sekhabi, and Van Graan’s historiographic readings of the anti-apartheid movement criticize the ANC by staging the party’s journey from banned radical socialist liberation party to corrupt neoliberal ruling party. Even before South Africa’s system of legally sanctioned racial oppression offcially ended with the unbanning of opposition parties in 1991, anti-apartheid artists faced calls to “forget about apartheid and move on” from both sides of the political spectrum.6 Beginning in 1948, theatre practitioners reached across the color-barrier to create a transnational theatre of liberation that raised awareness of human rights abuses and imagined a reconciled future for South Africa. By the late 1980s, however, many cultural producers and critics lamented the protest mode’s limiting binaries. Novelist Njabulo Ndebele argued in Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture that protest art propagated an oppressed, colonized mindset.7 Lawyer and ANC activist Albie Sachs’s 1989 position paper, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines,” advocated for art that could “expose contradictions and reveal hidden tensions,” rather than art with the correct political position.8 Without the central theme of resistance, South African theatre artists searched for new ways to create a sense of identity and nationhood—overwhelmed by the apparent arrival of the post-apartheid future for which they had fought. As actor John Kani explained in a 2006 interview, ANC leader Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on February 11, 1990, swiftly canceled every “Free Mandela” play in the world.9 After the 1994 democratic elections catapulted Mandela from South Africa’s most notorious terrorist to its president, theatre artists struggled to adapt to their country’s changing political and social circumstances. Central to this crisis in South African theatre was the question of how—or even whether—to represent the past onstage. At the same time, the country seemed to be asking similar questions. In 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began traveling the country, seeking to establish as complete a picture as possible of apartheid-era human rights abuses. The Commission injected new energy into South African theatre. As Greg Homann and Marc Maufort acknowledge in New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa, “TRC related performance is abundant enough that it could be considered a legitimate post-apartheid genre of theatre.”10 Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, the Khulumani Support Group’s The Story I am About to Tell, and Paul Herzberg’s The Dead Wait (all 1997), among many other plays, dramatized the Commission as it occurred,

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wrestling with the TRC’s fundamental question: how to reconcile the past in order to build the future? After this theatre of reconciliation, playwrights such as Koboekae, Sekhabi, and Van Graan posed a diferent question: how to resolve the ANC’s radical past with its neoliberal present? Their plays paradoxically turned backward, examining hypocrisies and fault lines in post-apartheid political and social life by reinterpreting the history of the anti-apartheid movement. As late as his fnal months in prison in 1990, Mandela renewed his commitment to the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter that banks should be nationalized and land should be redistributed, among other progressive mandates.11 The Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), enacted after the 1994 elections, seemed responsive to the reallocation of wealth and property demanded by the Charter. In March 1996, however, the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy package supplemented RDP, signaling the ANC’s neoliberal shift.12 GEAR led to the privatization under predominately White ownership of many of the basic public utilities in the poor townships. Community activist Ashwin Desai characterized this neoliberal right-turn as neo-apartheid based upon the segregation of classes instead of races.13 President Mbeki (1999–2008) continued these policies in 2003 with his Black Economic Empowerment program (BEE). This policy granted privileges to an emerging nouveau-riche Black class while poor Blacks remained in essentially the same or only slightly improved conditions.14 Increasing dissatisfaction with the TRC’s outcome compounded the failure of Mbeki’s economic programs. Many of apartheid’s perpetrators received amnesty, while countless victims of the Afrikaner-led National Party (NP) government’s racist policies still struggled. Delayed for years, reparations for the 20,000 ofcially designated victims of gross human rights abuses arrived late in 2003 and did not lift their recipients out of poverty. Still others, who refused or were unable to register with the Commission, received nothing. Numerous corruption charges dogged the tenure of Mbeki’s successor Jacob Zuma (2009–2018). These included racketeering, money laundering, and fraud stemming from a 1999 arms deals known as the Strategic Defence Package.15 In addition, Zuma was accused of self-dealing and misappropriation of state funds related to 2009 improvements made to his private residence in Nkandla.16 In 2016, Public Protector Thuli Madonsela published a report alleging that the wealthy Gupta family’s infuence over Zuma constituted state capture.17 Against this backdrop of economic disparity and corruption, Koboekae, Sekhabi, and Van Graan’s history plays emerged. These playwrights rejected Charterist claims “that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” exposing Mandela’s dream of a “rainbow nation” as a liberal fantasy, or worse, a convenient cover for Mbeki’s conservative economic policies and Zuma’s rank corruption.18 In the fght for South Africa’s present and future, the legacies of martyred struggle heroes emerged as a key cultural battleground. In 2007, the Biko Foundation commissioned playwright Martin Koboekae to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Biko’s death. On August 18, 1977, National Party agents arrested Biko on suspicion of distributing infammatory pamphlets. Police

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interrogators tortured and eventually murdered him on September 12, 1977. Koboekae’s charge was to create a play based on Biko’s collected writings I Write What I Like that would premiere at the Windybrow Theatre in Johannesburg’s Hillbrow neighborhood. When Koboekae delivered the play, however, the foundation refused to endorse it. Windybrow Artistic Director Jerry Pooe allegedly told Koboekae that, in the absence of the foundation’s validation, the playwright would need to cover half the costs of production, an expensive and risky ­proposition for Koboekae. Pooe then reportedly refused the production entirely. In conversation with Edward Tsumele of the Sowetan, Koboekae imputed that “The foundation did not want to endorse the play because of certain things they did not like.”19 He protested, “Now the Windybrow is unwilling to stage the play without the foundation’s blessing.”20 Tsumele reported that “Pooe says that they would have loved to do the play with the blessing of the foundation.”21 A year later, Pooe argued that he had refused to produce Koboekae’s Biko play because the script was underdeveloped and not because the foundation withheld support.22 At the center of the controversy, Nkosinathi Biko, the executive director of the Biko Foundation and son of the South African Students’ Organization leader, clarified that the foundation had not intervened to stop the production out of a desire to protect his father’s image; rather, they rejected the play because Koboekae strayed from his commission: We held discussions with Martin [Koboekae] to do a play based on I Write What I Like as part of the 30th anniversary of the death of Biko. After those discussions Martin came back with a different play from the one we had discussed. So it’s not accurate to say we are not supportive. In fact, he can go ahead and do the play, but it’s not the play we wanted as part of the anniversary celebrations.23 When I interviewed Koboekae in 2010, he supported the Executive Director’s statement, recalling that “the media blew [the incident] out of proportion,” creating a firestorm out of an amicable misunderstanding.24 He explained, “[the Foundation] agreed [to my commission], thinking that I wanted to base the play upon I Write What I Like and that was not the case.”25 He continued, “I wanted some drama. I couldn’t get the drama from I Write What I Like.”26 Rather than present Biko the icon, Koboekae wanted to dramatize Biko the man. “I discovered some other issues surrounding other people, his life and so on, his friends, his relationships with others,” Koboekae told me in 2010. “That’s what I wanted to do,” he affirmed.27 Biko: Where the Soul Resides represented Biko’s biography not as hagiography but as historiography. Koboekae’s play examines key relationships in Biko’s life, from his 1968 founding of the South African Students’ Organization, while a medical student at the University of Natal, to his embrace of Black Consciousness, an ideology similar to US American Black Power, to his death in police custody. Biko begins shortly before the titular character’s murder. The play then cycles through

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a series of chronologically ordered fashbacks and returns to the frame story at its conclusion. Biko’s short scenes reject conventional plot structure. Instead, the play presents snippets from Biko’s life, including the struggle hero arguing about politics, giving speeches, and—controversially—drinking with friends and pursuing women. Koboekae justifed his choice to include these little-known sides of Biko. “[Biko] was not as astute and infallible as some would want us to believe,” he explained to Tsumele of the Sowetan, “Like any young leader of his time, he attracted all sorts of individuals, and the culture of excessive drinking, promiscuity and general youthful indiscretions was unavoidable.”28 The playwright continued: In essence, [Biko: Where the Soul Resides] attempts to show the man behind the icon. Without trivializing, misrepresenting and devaluing the sacrifces and achievements of Biko, we are trying to capture the essence of Biko as a man, father, son, lover, community and political activist who was prepared to sacrifce his life for the advancement of his fellow students, colleagues, community and humanity in general.29 Certainly, Koboekae set forth a sprawling agenda for his Biko play, one that he admitted was overreaching. He explained that because South Africa had not seen a play about Biko on its main stages, “That’s why we’re having this disjointed thing [the Biko play] because we’re touching on diferent issues, because we’re trying to realize what the man stood for and it’s resulted in a disjointed efort.”30 Though he acknowledged the script’s shortcomings, he did not feel that Biko courted controversy for its own sake. In Koboekae’s estimation, the play held broad appeal. It featured the episodic structure of a soap opera, a popular post-apartheid entertainment form; it starred television celebrities Masoja Msiza as Biko and Jabulile Tshabalala as Mamphela Ramphele; the action even unfolded across two acting spaces on opposite sides of the stage separated by darkness, mimicking a two-camera setup for flming a sitcom. 31 Why, then, did a soap-opera-like play about a major struggle fgure, which premiered at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre Laboratory, arrive shrouded in accusations of “censorship?”32 The Biko controversy stemmed from a historiographical question at the heart of post-TRC South African life: how to represent the past, especially martyred, heroes of the liberation struggle. Given their sacrifce to the cause, should these leaders appear faultless or should they be depicted as fesh-and-blood human beings? In his eforts to reveal the “authentic” Biko, Koboekae risked presenting the resistance leader as a drunkard and a womanizer. The playwright rejected this characterization in our interview, “For me he was not a drunkard. He just […] shared some convivial moments with friends.”33 Koboekae pointed out that Biko drinks in only two of thirteen scenes. Whether or not Koboekae invited scandal with Biko, the play furthered his career. For sixteen years, the mainstream theatre community largely had ignored

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Koboekae’s work on the fringe program of the National Arts Festival, held annually in Grahamstown. Perhaps due to Biko: Where the Soul Resides’ status as a “banned” play, the Festival organizers accepted it onto the main program in 2008.34 Prior to its arrival in Grahamstown, the play’s champion in the press, Tsumele, argued that “Koboekae has displayed bravery in the face of reluctance from those that wield the power to decide who can see what art, where and how.”35 In his director’s note, Koboekae positioned the play as a South African celebration of Biko’s life, lamenting that Biko’s own country had not sufciently honored him in art.36 The Grahamstown critics rejected both of these views of Biko, seizing on the play’s episodic structure, its depictions of fgures still in the public eye, and its apparent critique of post-TRC politics. Theresa Edlmann, writing for Cue, felt that “Just as the design of the stage consisted of stark, fragmented, half-constructed arenas of action, so the […] incremental building of the story felt disjointed and not sufciently theatrically integrated.”37 In addition to its structure, Edlmann objected to the play’s inconsistent use of dramatic devices such as direct address. Brent Meersman also commented on the play’s structure, criticizing its realistic style, which “like much of South African theatre relates the action using the staid plodding method of a series of chronologically ordered scenes with blackouts in-between.”38 Though Meersman praised Koboekae’s choice to humanize rather than lionize his subject, he viewed Biko as a step backward, artistically. “[Biko] is a classic piece of didactic protest theatre,” wrote Meersman, “with lengthy political debates and hectoring rhetoric awkwardly wrung from the dialogue and in which the characters are often reduced to the function of megaphones for the author’s message.”39 Equally perplexing to the play’s critics was Koboekae’s depiction of current political fgures as oversexed young revolutionaries. Mamphela Ramphele, an accomplished Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) activist who later became the frst African female managing director of the World Bank and the founder of the Agang political party, appears as a giggly, subservient sexpot, who quietly listens as the men drink, smoke cigarettes, and talk politics.40 Likewise, Koboekae depicts Strini Moodley, one of South African Students’ Organization’s few Indian members, as a fool available for comic relief. These portrayals combined with scenes of Biko’s womanizing and drinking led reviewers to conclude that rather than celebrating the struggle fgure, Koboekae’s play could be cited by BCM opponents. Koboekae’s apparently biting critique of the ANC government as a haven for “nepotism, corruption, and factionalism” lent these accusations credence.41 At one point, Barney Pityana, a human rights lawyer and theologian, turns to Biko and asks him what will happen if the liberation movement succeeds only to betray its own people. Biko responds that if that should come to pass, “I would rather be dead.”42 The playwright appears to comment directly on the post-TRC situation engendered by the ANC’s neoliberal reforms, such as GEAR and BEE, which many South Africans feel have forsaken the liberation movement. Nonetheless, when I questioned Koboekae concerning this exchange, he demurred, saying that he had

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taken the line from Biko himself. “How people think if I am antigovernment?” asked Koboekae. It’s not like that. It is a line that Steve made--is a question that Steve posed that I just--in the play I took that license […] I gave it to Barney. Barney asks him the question, but he asked the question.43 In Biko’s writings, there are a number of statements to which Koboekae could have referred, including this one in response to an interviewer’s question as to whether Biko desired a socialist state: If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks fltering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday.44 Had the critics misinterpreted Koboekae’s intentions? Were the dismissals of Moodley and Ramphele depicted in Biko actually historically accurate critiques of the South African Students’ Organization as a racially exclusive boys club? The scene highlights issues in using the theatre to interpret South Africa’s past and imagine the country’s future. What many critics read as Koboekae’s anti-government stance—which given the play’s depiction of drinking and womanizing could be used to discredit the BCM from its inception—was, in fact, a fairly literal representation of Biko’s radical hopes for a future that he did not live to see: his imagined future. Whatever its faults, Biko: Where the Soul Resides refects Koboekae’s embodied historiography of the South African Students’ Organization president. By portraying the BCM in its infancy, Koboekae traced contradictions between the liberation movement’s ideals and the reality of ANC-led democracy. Where Koboekae’s play demystifed a well-known Black Consciousness leader, Aubrey Sekhabi’s Mantolo: The Tenth Step (2008) rescued an unknown resistance fghter, Sibusiso Masuku, from obscurity. After becoming artistic director of Pretoria’s State Theatre in 2002, Sekhabi reassured veteran critic Adrienne Sichel, “I made it clear I’m a playmaker. If that space is not given to me, I’ll die as an artist. I can’t stop.”45 Nevertheless, the responsibilities of remaking the formerly “whites only” State Theatre in the image of post-apartheid Black identity led to a drought in his creative output. With Mantolo, Sekhabi emerged from a nearly decade-long playwriting hiatus with renewed creativity.46 The play began a fertile writing period, which continued with Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu (2009) and The Rivonia Trial (2010). Sekhabi confessed to Diane de Beer, “I have always wanted to develop a particular style and voice and I’m back there.”47 After a long career, in which he progressed through a number of theatrical styles, most notably musicals and melodramas based on township musical impresario Gibson Kente’s Black Consciousness work, Sekhabi found his own unique voice in this series of history plays.

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Sekhabi’s docudrama based on Major Sibusiso Masuku’s life seemed to appear out of nowhere. The play was not part of the State Theatre’s planned season. There was no funding for it in the theatre’s budget. He cast Mantolo by asking his acting friends—many of whom performed in his early National Arts Festival Fringe work—to donate their time. The project began in October 2008, when Kholofelo Kola, a former member of Gibson Kente’s company and a twenty-year veteran of Sekhabi’s ensemble, suggested that the Artistic Director write about “Mantolo,” the legend of their shared Soshanguve hometown. Sekhabi told Diane de Beer that after meeting Masuku, he immediately knew we had to tell this story but at issue was trying to fnd the way to tackle it best. […] We needed to uncover [Masuku’s] life, where he came from, how he became involved and what happened to him.48 In order to tell Masuku’s real-life prison story, Sekhabi drew on the history of BCM anti-apartheid agitprop; yet he also combined these struggle forms into his own style, avoiding hagiography by adding layers of complexity and ambiguity. Hardship and violence characterized Masuku’s life in the anti-apartheid movement. He joined the ANC’s guerilla army Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), Xhosa for “Spear of the Nation,” in the early 1980s, underwent training in Swaziland, and carried out sabotage missions in the homelands before his arrest under the Terrorism Act of 1967. National Party prosecutors then falsely accused the imprisoned Masuku of murdering a policeman and sentenced him to hang. The NP stayed his execution twice. The second reprieve occurred as Masuku stood on the tenth of ffty-two steps to the gallows. His narrow escapes earned him the nickname “Mantolo,” which derives from combining his name with the tsotsitaal word ukutola, which means “always winning.”49 After gaining his freedom with the release of political prisoners in 1994, Masuku learned that he had contracted HIV/AIDS, which he attributed to medical treatments he received after ending a thirty-nine-day-long hunger strike, protesting his incarceration. He told Lindile Sifle of The Daily Dispatch, “I’ve spent my life facing death because of the apartheid government and now I’m living with death inside my body because of HIV.”50 Prior to Mantolo’s premiere, Masuku was an unknown struggle fgure on the national stage. Sekhabi’s biographical play, written in collaboration with Masuku, sought to recuperate the man to the history of the liberation movement. Sekhabi also continued the work of the TRC by providing a healing process for Masuku himself. Masuku reported that watching his painful story being enacted in front of an audience night after night had a therapeutic efect. Masuku’s story resembled that of another former death row inmate, Duma Khumalo, who spent seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Khumalo had attended an anti-apartheid rally during which a policeman was murdered. He was sentenced under South Africa’s “Common Purpose” doctrine, which held that one only had to be in the vicinity of a crime to be charged with that crime. Khumalo later told his story in the Khulumani Support Group’s The Story I am

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About to Tell (1997) and in Yael Farber’s play based on Khumalo’s prison experiences He Left Quietly (2002). In a convention borrowed from these TRC theatre pieces, Mantolo ended with a post-play discussion in which Masuku, the cast, and Sekhabi addressed audience questions. Masuku’s participation in the post-play discussions became part of a “healing process,” a phrase that acquires an added weight given the resistance fghter’s HIV/AIDS status.51 In fact, Sekhabi noted an improvement in Masuku’s health over the course of the play’s rehearsal process. “It’s been amazing to watch the transformation [in Masuku],” he remarked to Diane de Beer. Mantolo popularized Masuku as a struggle fgure, contributing to his slow recovery from apartheid-era trauma. After seven months of work ancillary to his job as Artistic Director, Sekhabi’s Mantolo: The Tenth Step opened in the State’s Arena Theatre on May 19, 2009. The play unfolds from a frame-story in which the imprisoned freedom fghter (played by actor Tipo Thindisa) narrates his life from his prison cell. The cast then enacts Masuku’s memories of fghting in the MK. In her review, Adrienne Sichel highlighted the play’s epic nature, writing, “The enormity of this evolving play, which deals with torture, necklacing and many facets of apartheid and struggle brutality, cannot be underestimated.”52 Where Sichel praised its breadth, others criticized its overindulgence. The Sunday Times’ Zingi Mkefa admitted, “As it stands, the play could do with more cutting.”53 Despite its perceived excesses, Mantolo’s strength lies in its ambiguous ending. Unlike anti-apartheid agitprop and theatre of reconciliation, Sekhabi’s biographic docudrama does not end in triumph or redemption. Martyred struggle heroes do not rise from the dead, nor do apartheid’s victims defantly share their stories with an international audience. Instead, Mantolo dramatizes the moment after Masuku’s release. Stricken with HIV/AIDS and living in poverty, the resistance fghter inhabits a room not demonstrably larger than the cell where he waited for eight years to die. Sekhabi’s depiction of Masuku’s post-apartheid life with AIDS shames President Mbeki, whose record of HIV/AIDS denialism remains a black mark on his legacy.54 Mbeki’s health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang famously advocated garlic and beetroot as AIDS remedies.55 Mbeki’s HIV/AIDS policies have been blamed for 300,000 unnecessary deaths.56 Critic John Makoni asserted, “as fate would have it, in a free South Africa Mantolo is hardly better of. He has overcome numerous hurdles, only to return to a life of electricity coupons and scarce running water.”57 With this ending, Sekhabi transcended his anti-apartheid and reconciliatory models, creating a nuanced portrait of post-TRC Black life for racially mixed mainstream audiences. As Sichel observed, “Mantolo isn’t just a history lesson.”58 Rather, Sekhabi uses Masuku’s personal history and present circumstances to indict the ANC for abandoning average South Africans. Like Sekhabi and Koboekae’s history plays, satirist and social dramatist Mike Van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors also engages with struggle heroes’ legacies and uses an anti-apartheid drama format to critique the ANC government, but it relies self-consciously on a specifc protest play. Van Graan acknowledges in his unpublished manuscript that “Return of the Ancestors genufects to Woza Albert, a

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South African theatre classic featuring two actors with the basic theme of Jesus Christ’s return to South Africa during the apartheid era.”59 Gibson Kente alumni Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema premiered Woza Albert! (“Rise up Albert!” in Zulu) at the Market Theatre in April 1981. Van Graan’s updated version follows the resurrected struggle icons Steve Biko and Neil Aggett’s return to postapartheid South Africa to celebrate twenty years of democracy. Ancestors explains the fact that a Black actor plays Aggett, a White doctor and union organizer, by stating that the recently deceased Mandela insisted on sending both a Black and a White delegate; in a reversal of Mbeki’s BEE policies, the ancestors compromised by returning Aggett in a Black body. The play not only appropriates Woza Albert!’s plot and themes but also copies the struggle drama’s Poor Theatre aesthetic. Mtwa, Ngema, and director Barney Simon crafted a modern-day passion play that bore witness to apartheid’s human rights abuses and imagined a Black savior for South Africa. The piece blended Mtwa and Ngema’s South African township vaudeville training with Simon’s grounding in Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook’s Poor Theatre. Mtwa and Ngema played multiple parts, using limited props and costumes to tell the story through physical action and singing. In Van Graan’s post-apartheid reinterpretation, actors Siya Sikawuti and Mandisi Sindo step into Mtwa and Ngema’s roles and take on multiple characters in a series of short skits with the help of a small number of costumes and found objects—coats, hats, scarves, tires, showerheads, newspapers, umbrellas, etc. Ancestors reproduces many scenes from Woza Albert! with a post-apartheid twist, inviting the audience to refect on South Africa’s history and the past two decades of democracy. Like Woza Albert!’s Christ fgure, Biko and Aggett encounter economic injustices and political corruption that cause them to question their sacrifce. The play derives its satirical power from the fact that twenty years into democracy, many South Africans still await a savior. Like his fellow post-apartheid playwrights, Van Graan performs the work of a historiographer, using South Africa’s protest theatre history to comment on the country’s present economic, political, and social situation. His satire begins with Sikawuti-as-Biko meeting Mama, a stock character like Woza Albert!’s Auntie Dudu. In the apartheid-era play, Auntie Dudu tells the audience that she hopes Morena will return to South Africa because all of the White people will have parties and the discarded scraps on which she subsists will taste better.60 In Return of the Ancestors, Mama also describes eating scraps, but this time the leftovers come from the table of the majority Black ANC government. “We just have to be patient and vote for the same party,” she tells Biko, “and hope they keep their leader so he has enough time to eat, and then let us eat.”61 Eating is a popular metaphor for corruption in South Africa.62 In another scene lifted almost directly from Woza Albert!, two street vendors compete against each other for the attention of passing cars. In the original scene, two Black South Africans stand outside of the passbook ofce on Albert Street in Johannesburg, begging passing Whites for work. Apartheid’s passbook system forced all non-Whites in South Africa to carry a passbook with them that controlled every aspect of their lives, including

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where and when they could seek work. Van Graan adds a xenophobic valence to his post-apartheid version of the scene. One vendor is Zimbabwean (Zim) and the other is South African (SA). Zim ofers African brotherhood to SA and is told, “Fok of. You’re not my brother. You’re my competition.”63 When the Zim is run over moments later, SA makes a big show of solidarity, “No! You’ve killed my African brother! You’ve killed my brother!” he screams as he picks the man’s pocket.64 Immigrants from other African countries looking for work in South Africa continue to face xenophobic violence in the post-apartheid era, raising questions about Mandela’s vision of a “rainbow nation.”65 As Biko tells Aggett, “Let’s go see if Mandela’s rainbow nation works.”66 To which Aggett responds, “Or for whom it works.”67 By layering satirical references to the most disgraceful moments in the ANC’s frst two decades of governance, Ancestors paints a bleak portrait of post-apartheid South Africa. For example, in one scene President Zuma appears as a fre-andbrimstone African American Baptist preacher. He delivers the “Gospel of Jacob,” a litany of his supposed accomplishments.68 Sikawuti portrays him in the style of political cartoonist Zapiro ( Jonathan Shapiro), who uses a showerhead protruding from Zuma’s skull to call attention to the rape allegations against the president. In 2005, Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, an AIDS activist, accused Zuma of raping her. He denied the allegations, saying that their relationship was consensual. During the 2006 trial, Zuma testifed that he knew Kuzwayo was HIV positive when he had unprotected intercourse with her; but he was not worried about exposure, because he showered after the encounter. Zuma was later acquitted. Van Graan layers this satirical depiction of Zuma with a reference to another shameful post-apartheid incident. In the Baptist preacher scene, Sikawutias-Zuma speaks through a fake sign language interpreter, just as the president and other world leaders had at Mandela’s public memorial service. On December 10, 2013, Thamsanqa Jantjie, a man apparently sufering from schizophrenia, stood next to world leaders for hours and made “childish hand gestures,” to accompany their tributes in a bizarre mimicry of sign language interpretation.69 The episode outraged the global deaf community and became a symbol not only of the ANC’s corruption and incompetence but also its half-hearted embrace of inclusion. With the showerhead issuing from his skull and the wildly gesticulating “interpreter” by his side, Van Graan’s Zuma boasts of returning land to the people; of delivering electricity, clean water, sanitation, education, health care, security, jobs, and social welfare; and of creating economic prosperity and foreign investments. The interpreter turns each accomplishment into a failure with his “translation.” The returned land is for graveyards; the utilities are privatized; the toilets are open-air; the education is either expensive or substandard; doctors and nurses are leaving for opportunities abroad; the police are corrupt; unemployment is high; public grants create dependency; the Black millionaires are mainly Zuma’s family and friends; and the touted foreign investment means Gupta family interference in government policy.

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As Biko and Aggett continue their mission to “travel the length and breadth of South Africa to see if the sacrifces made by the ancestors were worth it,” the struggle icons are shocked to discover that township life has not demonstrably changed since apartheid.70 There’s a communal tap, no running water, and no medical clinics. The ANC promised electricity, houses, and schools that have not arrived. AIDS-related deaths are rising. In Woza Albert!, the NP government is initially pleased that Christ has chosen South Africa; but when it becomes clear that Morena (Tswana for “Lord”) aligns himself with the plight of the oppressed majority, they denounce him as a “cheap communist magician” and imprison him on Robben Island, the prison where Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years of incarceration.71 When Morena escapes his prison and walks across Table Bay toward Cape Town, the South African Defence Force drops a nuclear bomb on him that destroys half the city. In Woza Albert’s fnal scene, the Black savior returns from the dead and walks through the graveyard of martyred liberation heroes, resurrecting them.72 Biko and Aggett also visit a graveyard in Return of the Ancestors, one flled with young AIDS victims. Biko shakes his head in disbelief, “If the Boers had done this…we’d have called it genocide.” 73 The graves begin to speak to them. Biko and Aggett learn that there are 17,000 murders a year in post-apartheid South Africa, over forty-two a day. One gravestone informs them that life expectancy is lower than it was under apartheid.74 In Van Graan’s homage to Woza Albert!, the ANC government is initially pleased that Biko and Aggett have returned; but when it becomes clear that the struggle leaders align themselves with the majority of impoverished South Africans, they denounce Biko as “an agent of imperialism” and ignore Aggett completely. Finally, the ancestors arrive at the celebration of twenty years of democracy held at Nkandla, Zuma’s private residence, which the president renovated in 2009 with R246 million in public funds. Biko and Aggett are turned away at the door. Their invitations have been rescinded. When, Biko tries to enter anyway, the security ofcer shoots him. Van Graan’s stage direction describes the fnal moments of the play: Steve falls. He gets up and walks towards Security again. Security shoots again. Steve falls. He gets up and walks to Security again. Security shoots again and again. Steve doesn’t fall anymore. He just walks straight to Security who backs away, scared.75 In an epilogue to Ancestors, a newscaster tells the audience, There are reports that the spirit of Steve Biko is alive and among the people. We could not confrm this, but we would like to assure everyone, especially our international investors, that everything is under control. I repeat, everything is under control.76

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Both Woza Albert! and Return of the Ancestors depict the harsh conditions of their respective eras for the majority of South Africans. Yet both plays end in a place of hope. The spirit of the liberation struggle relentlessly revives itself and moves forward. Van Graan’s Return of the Ancestors studies and systematically dismantles the myths surrounding the current ANC as the party of liberation and the party of the people. It does so by reanimating Steve Biko and suggesting that the martyred leader would not recognize the democracy that he imagined so vividly in his writings and for which he gave his life. Nor would the current ANC recognize one of its most powerful voices if Biko were to start spreading his Black Consciousness ideology in post-apartheid South Africa. Within the structure of a conventional biographical drama, Martin Koboekae’s Biko: Where the Soul Resides stirred controversy for making a similar suggestion that Biko would be disappointed by the frst two decades of South African democracy. Though Biko does not appear in Mantolo: The Tenth Step, the struggle icon haunts Aubrey Sekhabi’s play. The same party that claims to be carrying the mantle of the martyred Biko has forgotten the still-living heroes of the anti-apartheid movement. Ordinary people like Major Sibusiso Masuku have not benefted from the ANC’s neoliberal policies. As Van Graan writes in Ancestors, “Biko will see that we’re worse of now than before. Before, we knew whites were the enemy. Now Zuma’s ANC defends white privilege and continues to kill and keep black people poor. They talk black, but act white!” 77 Van Graan wrote these words when Zuma’s grip on power seemed intractable. On February 14, 2018, Zuma resigned the presidency under pressure from the ANC. South Africa’s new president Cyril Ramaphosa arrived already tainted by his connection to the 2012 Marikana Platinum Mine Massacre in which police opened fre on striking miners, killing thirty-four and wounding seventy-eight others in the largest loss of life in a police action since the end of apartheid. Late in the play, Van Graan stages a scene where his two Black actors play archetypal White characters waiting for a plane at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport. “Apartheid’s gone twenty years already, and they’re still carrying this chip on their shoulders. They should just forget about apartheid and move on,” declares the frst character, known only as “Afrikaner.” 78 The other White character responds, “If you think the past owes you your future, you’ll never get on with the present.” 79 With this conversation between two privileged White South Africans, Van Graan critiques the racist White viewpoint that Black South Africans are entitled, stuck in the past, and should just get over apartheid. Slowly, Van Graan reveals his characters’ hypocrisy. Neither still lives in South Africa. Though they rail against corruption in the ANC government, each is illegally smuggling undeclared cash out of the country. Van Graan’s characters exemplify White fight; but their statements on South Africa’s past, present, and possible future refect an ongoing problem in the post-apartheid era: how to deal with the country’s racist past and its continued infuence on the present. Perhaps South Africa’s past does not owe the country a future, as the token White

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character suggests, but history plays such as those by Van Graan, Sekhabi, and Koboekae demonstrate how theatre-makers deploy embodied historiographies of the liberation movement to critique the post-empire moment.

Notes 1 Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2000). 2 For this chapter, I defne “history play” broadly as any play set either wholly or partially in the past. Additionally, I defne the post-empire as the period from 1994 to the present while acknowledging the difculty of determining exactly when the country entered the post-empire moment. Was it with the Union of South Africas creation on May 31, 1910, or when the Afrikaners wrenched political power from the English during 1948 elections that instituted apartheid? Or, did the post-empire moment occur in 1961 when the Afrikaner-led National Party (NP) severed ties with England and inaugurated the Republic of South Africa? Or, did South Africa fnally become post-imperial when the NP ceded political power to the ANC during the country’s April 1994 democratic elections? Arguably, any of these events, 1910, 1948, 1961, and 1994, could be considered entering the post-empire. 3 The South African Students’ Organization formed in 1968 as a result of a split with the integrated National Union of South African Students led by student activist, and later martyr, Steve Biko, then a medical student at the University of Natal. Dissatisfed with the National Union of South African Students, who expressed solidarity with the Black South African cause, yet were unwilling to dismantle their own White privilege, Biko abandoned collaboration with Whites in favor of a coalition of African, Indian, and Coloured, who self-identifed as Black, in opposition to the White apartheid government. Biko was elected the South African Students’ Organization’s president in 1969. See: Steve Biko, I Write What I Like ( Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 3. 4 In their work with The Veterans Project, digital media artist Boyd Branch and cultural historian Erika Hughes use the term embodied historiography to describe “the practice of regarding performers as historical documents, using the act of performance to expose the subjective processing of memory and historical events through the live layering of multiple perspectives.” Boyd Branch and Erika Hughes, “Embodied Historiography: Rupture as the Performance of History.” Performance Research 19, no. 6 (2014): 108–115, quote on 108. The Veterans Project juxtaposes actual veterans’ stories with digital media that disrupt their narratives. 5 Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representation of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000), xi. 6 Mike Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors,” unpublished script, 2014, email received by the author, Jul 4, 2018. 7 Njabulo Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 1991, reissued 2006), 65. Qtd. in Greg Homann and Marc Maufort, “New Territories, Exploring the Post-apartheid Stage,” New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa, eds. Greg Homann and Marc Maufort (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2015), 13. 8 Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines.” TDR 35, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 187–193, quote on 188. 9 John Kani, interview with the author, August 20, 2006. 10 Homann and Maufort, New Territories, 16. 11 Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2000), 15.

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12 Bond, Elite Transition, 16. 13 Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Postapartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 48. 14 Bond, Elite Transition, 39. 15 For information regarding the South African Arms Deal, see: “South Africa Arms Deal That Landed Zuma in Court: What You Need to Know,” BBC News, BBC, 6 April 2018. www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43668243. 16 For information about the Nkandla controversy, see: Carlos Amato, et al., “Constitutional Court Confrms Zuma Must Pay Back R7.8 Million for Nkandla,” The Mail & Guardian, 27 July 2016. mg.co.za/article/2016-07-27-constitutional-court-confrmszuma-must-pay-back-r78-million-for-nkandla. 17 In 2018, newly inaugurated South African president Cyril Ramaphosa appointed the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, or the Zondo Commission; its report is due in March 2021. See: The Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, 2020. www.statecapture.org.za. For Zuma’s relationship to the Gupta family, see: “The Guptas and Their Links to South Africas Jacob Zuma,” BBC News, BBC, 14 February 2018. www.bbc.com/news/ world-africa-22513410. 18 Charterists are those within South Africa that support the ANCs 1955 Freedom Charter. See: “The Freedom Charter,” Congress of the People, Kliptown, South Africa, 26 June 1955, available at: African National Congress. www.anc1912.org.za/f reedomcharter; for “rainbow nation,” see: Nelson Mandela, “Statement of the President of the African National Congress Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela at his Inauguration as President of the Democratic Republic of South Africa,” Union Buildings, Pretoria, 10 May 1994. www.gov.za/statement-president-african-national-congress-nelsonmandela-his-inauguration-president-democratic-0; for a detailed account of Mbeki’s neoliberal economic policies, see: Patrick Bond, Talk Left Walk Right: South Africas Frustrated Global Reforms (Pietermaritzburg: Univeristy of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2004). 19 Edward Tsumele, “Row over Biko Play: No Endorsement from Foundation.” Sowetan 13 ( June 2007): 3. 20 Tsumele, “Row over Biko play,” 3. 21 Tsumele, “Row over Biko play,” 3. 22 Mlungisi Zondi, “Biko, but Not as You Know Him,” Business Day Supplement The Weekender, 13 September 2008. www.businessday.co.za/weekender/article. aspx?ID=BD4A840810. 23 Tsumele, “Row over Biko Play,” 3. 24 Martin Koboekae, interview with the author, 16 July 2010. 25 Koboekae, interview with the author. 26 Koboekae, interview with the author. 27 Koboekae, interview with the author. 28 Edward Tsumele, “Play Portrays Bikos Human Side,” Sowetan, 24 August 2007, 3. 29 Tsumele, “Play Portrays Bikos Human Side,” 3. 30 Koboekae, interview with the author. 31 Notably, Koboekae later wrote Ga Re Dumele (2010), a South African sitcom. 32 Edward Tsumele, “Biko, through Another Lens,” Sowetan, 14 September 2007, 8. 33 Koboekae, interview with the author. 34 In subsequent years, Koboekae has returned to the fringe. 35 Tsumele, “Biko, through Another Lens,” 8. 36 Theresa Edlmann, “Fragments of an Iconic Life,” Cue, 4 July 2008, 7. 37 Edlmann, “Fragments of an Iconic Life,” 7. 38 Brent Meersman, “The Fast and the Past,” Mail and Guardian, 11–17 July 2008, 16. 39 Meersman, “The Fast and the Past,” 16. 40 The South African Students’ Organization, a radical anti-apartheid group comprised of Black South African university students, defned “Black Consciousness” in a June

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1968 manifesto as “an attitude of mind, a way of life,” in which the Black South African saw themselves “as self-defned and not as defned by others.” See: South African Students Organization, “South African Students Organization: SASO Policy Manifesto,” June 1968, South African History Online. www.sahistory.org.za/archive/ south-african-students-organisation-saso-policy-manifesto. Qtd. in, Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: Un iversity of California Press, 1978), 272. Meersman, “The Fast and the Past,” 16. Meersman, “The Fast and the Past,” 16. Koboekae, interview with the author. Biko, I Write What I Like, 169. Adrienne Sichel, “I Have to Look to the Future,” The Start Tonight, 18 December 2001, 2. Prior to Mantolo: The Tenth Step (2008), Sekhabi’s last single-author work was the township musical Homegirls (1997). Diane de Beer, “Shedding and Sharing,” The Star Tonight, 19 May 2009, 6. Diane de Beer, “Escape Artist,” The Star Tonight, 19 May 2009, 1. Tsotsitaal is the name given to a number of hybrid languages that combine Afrikaans, Tswana, Zulu, and other South African languages. These languages grew out of the racial and ethnic mixing that occurred in Sophiatown and other similar townships during the 1950s. Associated with township gangsters, it also became a language of resistance and liberation. Lindile Sifle, “Healing from a Life Spent Facing Death,” Daily Dispatch, 9 July 2009, 7. Qtd. in de Beer, “Shedding and Sharing,” 6. Adrienne Sichel, “More than Just a History Lesson,” The Star Tonight, 16 December 2008, 10. “Necklacing” was a horrifc practice in which a rubber tire was placed over the head of the victim, doused in petrol and set ablaze. Zingi Mkefa, “The Loud, Difcult Tale of a Shy Freedom Fighter,” Sunday Times, 31 May 2009, 15. Sarah Boseley, “Mbeki Aids Denial Caused 300,000 Deaths,” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 26 November 2008. www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/26/ aids-south-africa. Associated Press in Johannesburg, “South African Minister Who Championed Food to Treat Aids Dies,” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 December 2009. www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/16/dr-beetroot-dies-south-africa. Boseley, “Mbeki Aids Denial.” John Makoni, “Death Row Brought to Life Magnifcently,” Sunday Independent, 7 June 2009, 28. Sichel, “More than Just a History Lesson,” 10. Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, “Woza Albert!,” in Contemporary African Plays, eds. Martin Banham and Jane Plastow (London: Methuen, 1999), 219. Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” South African playwright Zakes Mda’s 1992 play The Mother of All Eating tackles government corruption in the independent country of Lesotho, which is entirely encircled by South Africa. South African theatre companies regularly revive the play to critique ANC government corruption. See Zakes Mda, Fools, Bells, and the Habit of Eating: Three Satires ( Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2002), 1–38. Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” See: Nelson Mandela, “Statement of the President of the African National Congress Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela at His Inauguration as President of the Democratic Republic of South Africa,” Union Buildings, Pretoria, 10 May 1994. www.gov.za/ statement-president- african-national-congress-nelson-mandela-his-inaugurationpresident-democratic-0.

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66 67 68 69

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Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Aislinn Laing and Josie Ensor, “Nelson Mandela Memorial Interpreter Was a Fake,” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 11 December 2013. www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/10510455/Nelson- Mandelamemorial-interpreter-was-a-fake.html. Laing and Ensor, “Nelson Mandela Memorial Interpreter.” Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon, “Woza Albert!,” 250. Such as former ANC president Albert Luthuli—the “Albert” of the title. Laing and Ensor, “Nelson Mandela Memorial Interpreter.” In 2014, when Return of the Ancestors premiered, life expectancy in SA rose from 52 years in 2005 to 59.1 years for males and 63.1 years for females. At the end of apartheid in 1990, life expectancy for South African males was 60.5 years. See: Mia Malan, et al., “After Drastic Drop SA Life Expectancy Rises,” The Mail & Guardian, 19 December 2014. mg.co.za/article/2014-12-19-sa-life-expectancy-drops/. Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.” Afrikaners are the descendants of Dutch settlers who frst arrived in South Africa in 1652 with Jan Van Riebeecks expedition to what would become Cape Town. Van Graan, “Return of the Ancestors.”

5 BRENDAN BEHAN’S DEPICTIONS OF MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH FAILURE Eleanor Owicki and Megan E. Geigner

Ireland presents a unique case study for how theatre refects the period after empire. Here we explore how theatre depicted Irish nationalism in the generation after Ireland achieved independence in 1922. While theatre played a vital role in the construction of Irish national identity before independence, the years after were, for the most part, typifed by static plays that reiterated increasingly dated versions of nationalism. One exception, however, is the playwright Brendan Behan, who had limited but signifcant output. His two completed full-length plays The Quare Fellow (1954) and The Hostage (1958) have become key parts of the Irish literary and theatrical canon. Behan’s work provided a rare and much-needed critique of the stagnation of Irish nationalism in the middle of the twentieth century. Since the twelfth century, the England and later the British Empire have laid claim to at least some part of the island of Ireland. Britain’s claim of Ireland predates colonialism, but other terminology from early models of empires’ holdings (such as client-state, protectorate, or tributary state) also fails to capture this centuries-long political relationship between the two countries. That said, Ireland spent much of its history fghting for its independence. The United Irishmen rising of 1798 is frequently cited as the beginning of the movement. It was unsuccessful, as were similar armed rebellions throughout the nineteenth century, but it was one of the factors that led to the Act of Union in 1800 which brought Ireland into the United Kingdom, at least nominally putting it on the same political footing as England, Scotland, and Wales. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, an increasing number of Irish Members of Parliament (MPs) worked toward “home rule” for the island through their positions within the UK government. During most of the independence movement, Ireland was a participant in the promulgation of the British Empire as much as it was a subject of it. Twenty-six of thirty-two counties gained

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independence in practical terms in 1922, although what is now known as the Republic of Ireland did not fully sever ties with Britain until 1949. Additionally, the remaining six counties became the separate state of Northern Ireland, which remains a part of the United Kingdom. While the United Irishmen rising cited enlightenment values like those of the American and French revolutions, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism overtook these values in the mid-nineteenth century. Before 1850, Ireland was home to eight million people, most of whom spoke Irish in their daily lives, but, by 1891, Ireland had lost half its population to famine and emigration, and most people spoke English. In 1893, Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League with the goal of “deanglicizing” Ireland. Along with encouraging a return to Irish forms of dress and sports, the Gaelic League pushed for the revival of the Irish language, which had largely been replaced by English except in selected parts of the remote west coast. As Mary Trotter notes, this form of identity was highly performative: “To buy an Irish product, or to wear a reproduction of a Tara brooch, or to speak Irish instead of English was to act out an identity counter to that imposed upon the Irish people from England.”1 In this way, the Gaelic League and those who shared its goals rooted their demands for independence in the claims that Irish culture was fundamentally diferent from British culture. Theatre quickly became a major part of the nationalist movement. Through the end of the nineteenth century, most of the important playwrights born in Ireland lived in London and wrote about English subjects for English audiences. These included George Farquhar (1677–1707), Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). In contrast, the Gaelic revival began a particular kind of self-consciously Irish theatre with explicit nationalist goals. As Shaun Richards argues, the Irish national theatre was a site to “stage the pressing concerns, or historical foundations, of the nation and, as in the care of the origins of the national theatre of Ireland, defne the characteristics according to which the aspirant nation could be identifed and distinguished.”2 The Abbey Theatre, which was founded in 1904 and primarily led by W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, became the focal point of this theatrical tradition. The plays produced by the Abbey and other nationalist theatres, such as the Irish National Dramatic Company, Theatre of Ireland, and Cork Dramatic Society, in the frst two decades of the twentieth century formed an identifable Irish school of drama that codifed nationalist Irish identity through Irish language (either directly or by using “Hiberno English,” which brings Irish-language syntax into English), Irish-identifed protagonists, and simple scenic design. They also highlighted Irish cosmologies in mythology, mysticism, or Catholicism. Many of the plays ofered a romanticized image of rural life in the west of Ireland, suggesting that peasants represented a truer form of Irishness than audiences in Dublin whose identity had been diluted by proximity to Britain. While there was diversity in style and voice, this canon of Irish plays was self-consciously Irish and helped defne what it meant to be Irish at this time.

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In the frst few decades of the Abbey, Irish sovereignty moved from a mission to a reality. In 1914, the UK Parliament passed a bill that granted Ireland home rule, but postponed enactment indefnitely due to the outbreak of World War  I. There were also concerns about how the implementation would afect the northern parts of Ireland that opposed home rule. This in turn led to the Easter Rising of 1916, arguably the most iconic confict in the Irish independence movement. Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), along with the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and the Cumann na mBan (“the women’s council”), took control of several government buildings in Dublin and held them for six days. The organizations represented diferent strains of nationalism: the IRB, and its most prominent leader Patrick Pearse (who also gaelicized his frst name as either Pádraig or Pádraic), tended to refect cultural nationalism, emphasizing Irish identity and making calls to Ireland’s heroic past. The ICA, led by James Connolly and others, focused on the creation of a socialist state that would be free of the injustices perpetrated by the British government. Cumman na mBan contained members subscribing to both of these views, but tended to align more with the ICA’s focus on economic issues. The Easter Rising was ultimately a military failure; the British Army crushed the rebellion, executing its leaders and sentencing participants to internment camps. However, it succeeded as propaganda rousing many formerly ambivalent Irish people to align themselves with the nationalist cause. It also shifted the method of revolution from a parliamentary battle to a martial one. In the War of Independence (1919–1921), leaders learned from the failure of previous rebellions. Rather than overtly rising up, the newly formed Irish Republican Army (IRA) engaged in guerilla-style warfare, launching targeted attacks on those perceived to be British agents and then blending back into the populace. This ultimately proved efective, and in 1921, IRA leader Michael Collins and the British government negotiated the “Anglo-Irish Treaty.” This provided a great deal of independence for the island but did not entirely remove it from British control. It also partitioned the island, creating the political entity of Northern Ireland and allowing it to independently decide to remain part of the UK with the remainder (and majority) becoming the Irish Free State. While Collins and his supporters felt that this deal fulflled enough of their goals to be worth accepting, others disagreed. This led to Irish Civil War (1922–1923), in which Eamon de Valera led those who had opposed the treaty in direct confict against those who supported it. The pro-treaty side ultimately triumphed, but this did not put an end to the disagreement. The IRA, although much diminished, would continue to seek to break all ties with the British state and to bring Northern Ireland into the Irish Free State. Brendan Behan was born on February 9, 1923, in the midst of the Civil War. He came into a family that was deeply involved in the republican, or anti-treaty, movement. Indeed, when Brendan was born, his father Stephen was imprisoned for his role in the Civil War. Brendan’s mother Kathleen was similarly political, speaking in favor of republican causes throughout her life. His maternal uncle

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Peadar Kearney had written The Soldier’s Song, which became the anthem of the Republic of Ireland. Brendan joined the Fianna Éireann, the youth wing of the IRA, at age fourteen. In 1939 he was arrested while on a mission to set of a bomb in England. As he was only sixteen, he was sentenced to three years in an English prison for young ofenders. He would chronicle his experiences there, including the beginnings of his skepticism of nationalism, in his 1958 autobiographical novel Borstal Boy. Released and returned to Ireland in 1941, he would be arrested again the next year. Until 1946, he was held in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. This marked the end of his active involvement in militant republicanism. Behan became increasingly disillusioned with nationalism and particularly its failure to live up to the socialist goals of the independence movement. As is so often the case, the nationalism that had facilitated the independence movement proved more complicated once Ireland had achieved independence. The rifts created by the disagreement over the treaty lingered, with the more hardline republicans continuing to object to both the continued relationship to England and the partition. Brian Walker argues that one of the key dynamics on the entire island in the 1930s through the 1950s was an entrenchment of majority identity (Protestant unionism in the North, Catholic nationalism in the South), which moved away from the rhetoric of conciliation and bridgebuilding that had immediately followed partition.3 During the 1930s and 1940s, Ireland became more isolationist, as was exemplifed by their neutrality in World War II. In 1948 the nation declared itself a republic, formally severing fnal ties with Britain, but the issue of partition continued to cause discomfort. The Irish government ofcially maintained the position that partition was invalid, but in practice did little to alter the status quo. Irish government crackdowns on the IRA in the 1950s demonstrated the extent to which the state had distanced itself from the militarism of its nationalist past. The period following independence also saw a signifcant shift toward more conservative social values. The Catholic Church, which had not played a signifcant role in the movement for independence, gained considerable power within the state. They shaped legislation, such as the prohibition on divorce (enshrined in the 1937 constitution and not reversed until 1995). Eamon de Valera would become the politician most closely associated with this more conservative and isolationist form of Irish identity. Although he was on the losing side of the Civil War, he remained active in politics. In 1926 he founded the Fianna Fáil party, which gained control of the government in 1932. De Valera became the President of the Executive Council and held that position (which under the 1937 constitution was renamed Taoiseach) of and on until 1959. He was then elected President of Ireland (a more ceremonial role distinct from the Taoiseach, who holds most of the political power) and held that position until 1973. From these positions, he espoused the conservative and religiouslyinfuenced views that dominated the state throughout the middle of the twentieth century. His radio broadcast in 1943 mirrored the kind of language and setting of Irish drama, reminiscing about the “‘frugal comfort’ enjoyed around

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the ‘fresides’ of ‘cosy homesteads’ set in ‘felds and villages’; an Ireland which would be ‘the home of a people living the life that God desires man should live.’”4 This was a clear break with the socialist traditions that the anti-treaty forces had generally embraced. Thus, both Behan and de Valera were moving away from their original visions of nationalism; de Valera toward a more conservative and isolationist position, and Behan toward an increasing skepticism of nationalism in general, and Irish cultural nationalism in particular. The theatre made during the mid-twentieth century was aligned with de Valera’s view of Ireland. As Richards puts it, Theatre progressively came tacitly to support the new state where oppositional forces hardened into a mirror-image of the colonial structure they had so recently displaced, even outdoing them in censoriousness and repression as a rigorous conservatism held sway over all debate.5 By this time, the Abbey Theatre had been ofcially established as a National Theatre and, along with its government funding, had a government-appointed managing director. Ernest Blythe served in this role from 1941 to 1967 and prioritized staging plays that would be fnancially successful and support the goals of the government over those that were more experimental in either form or content. Irish plays from this period are mostly out of print and rarely produced, except as historical artifacts, with Behan serving as an exception. He is one of the few mid-century playwrights to whom Declan Kiberd gives any signifcant attention in his seminal book Inventing Ireland (1995), and most histories of Irish theatre that cover this period highlight his work while also noting that it has relatively little in common with the rest of the theatre happening on the island at the time. Behan’s works express strong Irish identity but also skepticism about nationalism. This is clear in his use of the Irish language, which the government had continued to promote as central to Irish identity. Behan was fuent in Irish and wrote early versions of The Quare Fellow and The Hostage in that language. The fnal versions of both plays include Irish-language sections. At the same time, Behan was critical of the ways in which politicians like de Valera had aligned the language with conservative romantic nationalism. As Kiberd observes, [Behan] reserved great contempt for those profteers who used the native language in their bid for academic success, fnancial afuence and social respectability - that is to say, for the conservative wing of the nationalist movement. He knew that the dream of such people was not a free, Gaelic Ireland which would cherish its children equally, but simply to replace their former British overlords and take over their privileges.6 For the Irish-speaking characters in Behan’s plays, the Irish language is an apolitical means of expression. The conversations characters have in this language are

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much more likely to be casual small-talk than ideological pronouncements. In this way, Behan tied the language to the day-to-day concerns of Ireland’s socialist martyrs like Connolly rather than its cultural martyrs like Pearse. Behan also defed Ireland’s insularity during this period. He was strongly involved in the staging of his plays in London at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. While Irish theatre of this period generally ignored the artistic revolutions taking place in Europe, Behan embraced them. Many scholars have drawn connections between Behan and the absurdist playwrights, especially Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet.7 Unlike his countryman Beckett, however, Behan continued to live in Ireland, even as he maintained ties with the rest of Europe. Scholars frequently debate whether and to what extent Beckett should be considered a part of the canon of Irish theatre. There is no such question about Behan whose work remains steeped in Irishness. In addition to his use of the Irish language, the content of his plays mirrors Sean O’Casey’s interest in the plight of the Irish urban working class and trenchant critiques of post-independence Ireland’s failure to cast of the injustices created by the British state. This tension between an attachment to the idea of Irish nationalism and a disillusionment with the potential for achieving it infuses his works. As Christopher Murray notes, Behan lived in an Ireland he could never accept, looking back to an alternative history which was itself fawed. His writing, accordingly, was from the margins of Irish society, the underground, and was radical in form and content; yet there was also in his writings a longing for a community which might have been, a counter-ideal to de Valera’s dream.8

The Quare Fellow Behan’s frst successful play, The Quare Fellow, demonstrates the playwright’s opposition to the nation’s conservatism and his concern with the community of Irish on the margins. Behan’s frst attempt on the subject was an Irish-language play titled Casadh Súgáin Eile (“Another Twist of the Rope”), a reference to Hyde’s 1899 folk play Casadh an t-súgáin (“The Twisting of the Rope”). Behan adopted the fnal title when he rewrote the play in English. After Blythe and the Abbey rejected The Quare Fellow, Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift staged it at Pike Theatre, a new, ffty-seat venue near Trinity College in Dublin in 1954. Following a successful run at Pike, the production transferred to Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1956, and then to Broadway (at Circle-in-the-Square) the following year. The play’s success stems from Behan’s ability to capture the malaise of the generation after Irish independence. The lingering divisions of the Civil War and the Republic’s economic stagnation left many disillusioned.9 The play is about life in a prison the day before and the day of the execution of “the quare fellow,”

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a man who brutally murdered his brother and whom the audience never sees. In the course of three acts, the prisoners (“lags”) scheme to exercise what little agency they have while the warders (“screws”) attempt to remain in control. The relationships between the prisoners and the warders not only revive and revise stock characters (such as the Irish low-class person or servant who feigns naiveté but outwits the master10) from the previous two generations of Irish plays but also serve as an analogy between the empire and its subjects, and as a metaphor for the absurdity of post-independence Ireland. The Quare Fellow has often been compared to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). In both plays, the title character is frequently discussed but never seen, and this produces an anxious tension in the onstage characters. As Trotter notes, “the prison itself can easily be read as a metaphor for human experience, with its inhabitants representing humanity’s general search for existential meaning.”11 Unlike Godot, however, Behan’s text is directly rooted in a real social and political setting. In writing the play, Behan drew from his own experiences in prison and ofered commentary on the development of the Irish state. Thus, in addition to universal themes, the play is about the lost momentum, precarious national identity, and hopelessness in Ireland after empire. Behan, as both a son of Irish republicanism and a student of the theatre, uses the play to investigate the confuence between the two. The Quare Fellow employs and comments on many of the tropes of codifed national Irish drama established during Ireland’s self-conscious national awakening before independence in ways that question the nature of post-independence Irishness. The relationship between the lags and screws also subverts older Irish drama motifs. Although the jailers control the prisoners’ space and time, the prisoners create and control the prison culture. Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, ever waiting on Godot, the main prisoners—Prisoner A, Prisoner B, Dunlavin, Neighbour, Scholara, and Shaybo—revel in life’s small comforts despite their desperate situation. In Act One, Dunlavin and Neighbour perform a farcical routine of misdirection to get blissfully drunk on mentholated alcohol the prison doctor brings to their cell to apply to their leg pain. In Act Two, they make a game of placing bets (betting their Sunday ration of bacon) on whether the unseen, condemned prisoner will get a reprieve at the last moment as they stand near his half-dug grave. Rather than feeling depressed or reverent toward the impending death, the prisoners control the situation by making fun with it. When the time comes for the execution in Act Three, another of the prisoners, Mickser, gives a running commentary of it much like an announcer of a football game: We’re ready for the start, and in good time […] we’re of, in this order: the Governor, the Chief, two screws Regan and Crimmin, the quare fellow between them, two more screws and three runners from across the Channel, getting well in front, now the Canon. He’s making a big efort for the last two furlongs. He’s got the white pudding bag on his head, just a short distance to go. He’s in.12

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These betting, drinking, irreverent characters are not unlike Sean O’Casey’s characters from his Trilogy a generation before. Behan revises them, however, by ofering no punishment for their behavior. In avoiding any repercussions, these characters demonstrate the absurdity of the system. In fact, Dunlavin and Neighbour express gratitude for being locked up; they explain to Lifer, a character pardoned from execution in Act One, that being in prison ofers more comfort and stability than sleeping on the street while homeless.13 A play about prisoners presumes confict between the prisoners’ desire to be free and the jailers’ need to control their freedom, but the scene between Dunlavin, Neighbour, and Lifer is one of several rejecting that confict. By engaging in lively activities, they critique the idea of prison altogether and upend earlier plays’ central themes of yearning for sovereignty. The relationships in the prison also subvert critiques of authority fgures in earlier Irish plays. In pre-independence Irish theatre, unearned or unjust authority was generally assumed to either come directly from or stand in for British imperialism. Characters opposing that authority were assumed to stand in for the Irish people as a whole. Many nationalists’ discomfort with Synge’s Playboy of the Western World arose from the assumption that the young protagonist’s inefectual attempts to kill his overbearing father were intended as a mockery of the independence movement.14 The Quare Fellow maintains this critique of authority but grounds it in an urban setting where the Irish/British debate is moot. Although independence was supposed to usher in a new era of justice, the mechanisms of the state (here represented by the prison system) remain largely unchanged. In fact, the most cited line from this play is Dunlavin’s quip that the only diference between the British and the Irish penal systems is “the badge of the warders’ caps.”15 Like the heroes of pre-independence plays, the prisoners in The Quare Fellow show contempt for state authority, now an Irish authority. Instead of yielding to their fellow countrymen and captors, the prisoners collectively develop and maintain their own regulatory culture, including governing the use and sharing of cigarettes (also a major theme in Borstal Boy).16 In fact, the prisoners view Lifer with skepticism when he frst comes to the wing because he failed to follow the prisoners’ codifed social system but forgive him and accept him into their community.17 The various prisoners also defend one another from potential punishment from the warders: Dunlavin successfully convinces Warder Regan not to write up him and Neighbour for drinking, and Neighbour tattles on a singing prisoner in order to save him from a more severe sentence from a higher ofcial.18 The prisoners are a self-sustaining community that frequently undermines their rulers—the warders. However, unlike the critiques of the British Empire in pre-independence plays, The Quare Fellow does not attempt to create a strong moral division between the agents and victims of state control. All the characters in the play, whether criminals or warders, are capable of good and bad behavior. This is particularly evident in discussions of alcohol in Act One. Dunlavin and Neighbour laugh about a drunk prison doctor, and excoriate “Holy Healey”—an inspector

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from the Department of Justice, who they presume drinks secretly under an alias, which they call “educated drinking”19 —while the two scheme to sneak drinks of medical alcohol themselves. The prisoners recognize that the warders sufer and cavort as much as they do; they simply have a diferent uniform. This slippage was particularly evident in the play’s frst production, when, as Kiberd points out, “some of the actors in the cash-poor [Pike Theatre] company played warder and prisoner alike, which further served to emphasize Behan’s conviction that, under such stressful conditions, the opposite might easily become the double.”20 This nuance also allows for the inclusion of the warder Regan, whom all agree is a good man, even if his ability to express his goodness is limited by the system in which he works. The relationship between Warder Crimmin and Prisoner C presents the best example of how little separates the prisoners and wardens. It also provides a clear example of the way Behan uses Irish in his plays. Crimmin “sneaks up to the landing sometimes when the other screws aren’t watching and there [he and Prisoner C] are for hours talking through the spy hole, all in Irish.”21 Prisoner C explains to the other prisoners that he and Crimmin are both from County Kerry, a place idealized in earlier Irish drama because it was thought to be a bastion for Irishness, unpolluted by British cultural imperialism. One prisoner objects to the screw-lag relationship, asking “how can there be any discipline between warder and prisoner with that kind of familiarity?”22 But, of course, that is the point: there is no logical diference between the two sets of characters; as Kiberd points out, both men “are enduring a similar punishment, exile from their own civilization.”23 Behan again uses the motif from earlier Irish drama of emphasizing events that occur just ofstage to make a point about the lack of Irish identity in mid-century Ireland. When the play begins, the frst thing the audience encounters is an Irish folk song sung in English. In fact, each act begins with a few verses sung by an unseen inmate. At the top of the play, singing bookends the slow reveal of the setting, “the bottom foor or landing of a wing in a city prison, B.1.” with metal doors and the word SILENCE. Already, an ofstage presence resists the rules. Two of the cell doors have no name cards, suggesting a transition is impending. These two moves—the ofstage voice and the unnamed, ofstage arrivals—both echo a Gaelic revival tool. Richard Allen Cave argues that Yeats and other Irish playwrights remade doors into important philosophical thresholds Ofering entrance to alternative values which prove subversive of what the dramatic action has established as the prevailing status quo. The simplest, most necessary feature of any theatrical setting—the door which allows entrances and exists—ceases here to be merely functional and is invested with a distinct purpose; it is all these plays at the most fundamental level require, the means of defning an inner, as distinct from an outside, space; other elements of a design-scheme help defne historical period and social context, but the doorway focuses attention on the psychological enquiry which shapes the action.24

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He posits that “the imagined ofstage world of these plays comes in time to be as important to the resolution of the dramatic action as what is depicted onstage by more traditional means.”25 Like the Irish dramatists before him, Behan uses this convention. Act One has a window to the women’s yard, Act Two has a grave, and Act Three has a gallows, none of which the audience can see. Each of these thresholds speaks to actions unavailable. Presumably, and looming over all of the characters in the play, is a door out of the prison. Both the warders and the prisoners speak of it, and, in Act Two, Behan again uses sound to point to an ofstage space: “A Warder passes, sounds of the town heard, factory sirens, distant ships.”26 Like in Yeats’s plays, these thresholds ofer the possibility of change to the status quo, but unlike the earlier plays, no one appears in them. While these portholes ofer a promise of change and a question about what looms outside, the prisoners and warders both already know the answer. Behan does two things with the positioning of these thresholds. First, he points out the liminality of everyone in the prison. The Lifer transitions between death row and a life sentence; when he tries to stall the transition by taking his own life, those around him refuse to let him die. Warder Regan fnds himself in confict between his state-given authority and Christian doctrine as each holds diferent values about taking a human life. The whole of the play is a matter of waiting while characters transition between statuses, but they never do so by crossing thresholds the audience can see. Second, Behan uses these ofstage doors to critique the promise of the Irish state. The Irish identity promised by independence arrived at some unknown time and walked into an unknown door unnoticed. That is what this play marks: England is no longer the gatekeeper, Ireland is no longer prisoner, but still, nothing has changed. At this moment, they are neither British nor Irish in the way they imagined themselves. Instead of a threshold through which the prisoners can pass to begin a new life and mark change, the play’s setting has only an obstructed window and a half-dug grave. Furthermore, Irish folk culture exists, but it is practiced only by the prisoners, while the warders, all of whom are Irish themselves, continually threaten and silence. Kiberd posits that even the climax of the play—the capital punishment— happens ofstage because the public only permits it because they don’t see it.27 While that may be true, it is signifcant that every major plot point and defning character development in this play happens ofstage. Rather than reading this as an attempt to hide state execution, this suggests that Ireland itself remains ofstage, not yet embodying its long-awaited independence, yet no longer ftting into the clear sense of Irish identity crafted during the Gaelic revival. In The Quare Fellow, Behan repurposes earlier Irish drama tools to demonstrate that although the Irish have their own state, they no longer have an identity. The power relationships between the guards and prisoners show that it is not British but Irish nationalist identity forged at the turn of the century that maligns these characters. The prisoners retain their Irish language, and the state facilitates their practice of Catholicism (by sending a priest to visit them in the prison), and yet they seem lost and as though they have no idea who they are. The

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young prisoners Shaybo and Scholara suggest this loss of self will endure in future generations, too. Shaybo and Scholara make no claims to freedom, but create and follow meaningless ways to pass the time in prison that make them feel a little control; they amble about the prison yard, pilfer cigarettes, swipe alcohol from the prison doctors. The next generation continues to be displaced in the era after empire in The Quare Fellow.

The Hostage Behan’s second English-language play, The Hostage (1958), more explicitly centers questions of nation and Ireland’s relationship to the (rapidly shrinking) British Empire. It also highlights the tensions between diferent generations of Irish nationalists. The play is set in a boarding house (whose residents are mostly sex workers) owned by Monsewer, an Englishman who fought in the republican movement and whose grip on reality is tenuous. The house is managed by his republican compatriot Pat and Pat’s “consort” Meg. Life at the boarding house is sent into uproar when several current IRA members arrive with Leslie, an English soldier they intend to hold hostage. The IRA men threaten that if a young man convicted of republican activities in Belfast (part of Northern Ireland and therefore still under the control of the British government) is hanged, they will also execute Leslie. The severity of the situation fghts against the farcical chaos of life in the boarding house, which is frequently interrupted by songs and asides to the audience. In the end, Leslie is neither executed nor rescued, but instead killed by crossfre when the police come to rescue him. The Hostage adopted the basic plot and characters from Behan’s 1958 Irishlanguage play An Giall (performed at the Darner Hall in Dublin). It was not merely an English translation of the earlier play, however; Behan made signifcant changes that drastically altered the tone and style. An Giall is a fairly straight-forward realist play, while The Hostage incorporates music, a larger cast, and a more satirical tone.28 The Hostage was frst staged at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop later that year, and the script was heavily developed during the rehearsal process. Scholars generally agree that Littlewood played a major role in shaping the text, although it is harder to determine her exact contributions or Behan’s feelings about them (Figure 5.1). The Hostage is strongly infuenced by the techniques and theories of Bertolt Brecht, presumably due to Littlewood’s infuence. In 1955, only three years before The Hostage, she had directed and starred in the frst British production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. As in many of Brecht’s scripts, the musical numbers in The Hostage (not present in An Giall) disrupt the narrative fow. The characters directly engage with the pianist (who is not otherwise a character in the play), requesting songs and ofering feedback. The script also includes signifcant direct address to the audience, in some cases demonstrating a self-aware metatheatricality that foreshadows postmodernism. In a moment of unusual sincerity, Meg sings “Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week,” a song celebrating those

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FIGURE 5.1

The Hostage at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, 1959.

Source: J.B. Hanley/Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Image.

who died in the 1916 rising. Leslie then names Behan himself as the author of the song, prompting a disagreement about whether Behan is too anti-British or too anti-Irish. Leslie quips to the London audience, “He doesn’t mind coming over here and taking your money.”29 The overall efect of this is to cast doubts on Behan’s sincerity and, by extension, on the motivations and political rhetoric of his characters. The play ofers a critique of martial nationalism through the depiction of its IRA characters. These can be divided into two groups, neither of which is particularly admirable. The younger members, who have not seen signifcant armed confict, are brutal and uncompromising as a result of their lack of personal experience with the horrors of violence. The older members, who participated in the storied Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, are lost in a fog of their own delusional romanticism. The younger IRA members are arguably the least developed characters. Their resistance to humanizing Leslie sets them apart from the other characters, who interact with the soldier as a person rather than a bargaining chip. At the same time, they show a certain naiveté about the more pragmatic aspects of their plan. Perhaps most damningly for Behan, the current IRA men have rejected the socialist strain of earlier nationalism. When an unnamed IRA ofcer comes to prepare the house for the hostage, he brags that “the movement is purged of the old dross.”30 When the play was written and frst staged, the IRA were largely inefectual and frequently derided. This would

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change in the late 1960s with the beginning of the confict in Northern Ireland, but the original audiences would have found it relatively easy to view these characters as naive posturers rather than threats to the status quo. The most obvious representative of the older IRA members is Monsewer, the house’s owner. He is an Englishman who was educated at Oxford but devoted himself to the cause of Irish nationalism with a zeal stereotypical of converts. His name immediately points to the artifciality of elements of Irish cultural nationalism. “Monsewer” is a variation on the French monsieur, chosen during the movement of gaelicizing names when they decided that the Irish term for “mister” was too difcult. The presence of the word “sewer” in the name may further suggest the distance between his romantic persona and his actual situation. Throughout the play, Monsewer seems to be disconnected from reality, believing himself still a part of an active campaign against the British. Pat, who had served with him in these earlier conficts, works to maintain this image, translating the sordid events in the house into glorious preparations for battle. In contrast to Monsewer, Pat is entirely aware of the current political situation, and as such is a mouthpiece for Behan’s own disillusionment with the competing nationalist movements. Pat is derisive of the role of the IRA in contemporary Ireland: “This is nineteen-sixty, and the days of the heroes are over this forty years past. Long over, fnished and done with. The I.R.A. and the War of Independence are as dead as the Charleston.”31 When it comes to his own history with nationalism, however, Pat seesaws between romanticism and cynicism. At times he spins tales of daring exploits that never actually happened. At others he is skeptical of the idealism his compatriots at the time expressed. For example, he describes supporting laborers in taking over the land of a lord even when the IRA told them to abandon it: “That social question would be settled when we’d won the thirty-two-county republic. […] The Kerry men said they weren’t greedy, they didn’t want the whole thirty-two counties, their own fve thousand acres would do ‘em for a start.”32 Pat’s ambivalence to nationalism is born not of a lack of commitment but of being pulled in opposite directions by idealism and cynicism. In this way, the tenor of his comments frequently mirrors the frustrations Behan expresses in his autobiography Borstal Boy. This does not protect him from criticism within the play, however. Following Leslie’s death, Pat tries to comfort Teresa, the housemaid who has begun to fall in love with Leslie, by invoking the larger political issues that led to Leslie’s kidnapping. Teresa rejects this logic, however: “It wasn’t the Belfast Jail or the Six Counties that was troubling you, but your lost youth and your crippled leg. He died in a strange land, and at home he had no one.”33 Here, Teresa recasts the lingering vestiges of Pat’s nationalism as self-serving egotism rather than political commitment. The play also expresses disappointment with the two central fgures of the War of Independence and the Civil War. The frst is Michael Collins, one of the architects of the War of Independence, who lost the support of many of his former comrades when he negotiated and supported the treaty that accepted partition and an incomplete independence. He became the Chairman of the new

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Irish Free State’s provisional government but was assassinated during the Civil War. Had he been killed a few years earlier by the British, he would have become a martyr to Irish Nationalism, joining the ranks of rebels including Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmett, Patrick Pearse, and James Connolly. His death in a war that undermined narratives of Irish unity, however, meant that his legacy became more complicated and was therefore often avoided. Pat leads the characters in a song that embodies this ambivalence, wishing that Collins had “died by Pearse’s side or in the G.P.O. / Killed by an English bullet from the rife of the foe” so that his compatriots could “have cried with pride at the way he died.”34 The song is tender toward Collins, refusing either to endorse his decision to support the treaty or to condemn him as a traitor for this decision. Instead, it embraces the complexity of his legacy and expresses the conficting feelings this complexity brings up in the singers. Like much of Behan’s work, it is a lament for nationalism’s inability to maintain its simplistic moral framework when confronted with the real world. The second fgure criticized is Eamon de Valera, who when the play was produced was nearing the end of his time as Irish Taoiseach. He began as a radical voice of militant nationalism, including opposing the treaty, but when he came to power he embraced a conservative cultural nationalism that seemed to deny both the possibility and the desirability of any kind of radical change. As the characters observe, his government actively investigated and prosecuted members of the IRA. Indeed, one of the few things that unites Pat and the IRA ofcer is their contempt for de Valera, which they express in unison after Meg suggests that the Taoiseach might be able to help the boy in the Belfast jail.35 Since they led opposing sides in the Civil War, Collins and de Valera are generally presented as enemies and opposites. In The Hostage they are presented as fundamentally the same, with the primary diference being the length of time it took them to capitulate to pragmatic demands. The play’s premiere corresponded with a larger crackdown on the IRA by the de Valera government, which underlined the changes the man had undergone. The play is just as critical of the British government as it is of the Irish government and the IRA. Leslie makes this clear as he contradicts his captors’ belief that his kidnapping will have any efect on the planned execution in Belfast. He says, You’re as barmy as him if you think that what’s happening to me is upsetting the British Government. I suppose you think they’re all sitting around in the West End clubs with handkerchiefs over their eyes, dropping tears into their double whiskies. Yeah, I can just see the Secretary of State for War now waking up his missus in the night: “Oh, Isabel-Cynthia love, I can hardly get a wink of sleep wondering what’s happening to that poor bleeder Williams.”36 Indeed, Kiberd argues that one of the primary mistakes the IRA characters make in the play is believing that the British government will live up to its reputation

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for fair play.37 Like The Quare Fellow, The Hostage points to the ways independence has failed to efect signifcant transformations. Miss Gilchrist, a visitor to the house caught up in the operation, laments that “Things haven’t been the same since the British went,” and Leslie responds with a remark that emphasizes continuity over radical change: “They’ve not gone yet—I’m still here.”38 Throughout the play, the apolitical residents of the house appear to be the most moral. This is in spite of the fact that many of them are sex workers and therefore deemed—both by their own society and the IRA characters—to be immoral and unworthy of romantic ideas of Ireland. These apolitical characters see Leslie as a person, and do what they can to provide comfort during his imprisonment. The fact that two gay men are part of this compassionate group is particularly striking. While Rio Rita, one of the sex workers, and his client Princess Grace are highly stereotyped (as the feminine names suggest), they are also sympathetic characters who work with the other residents to protect Leslie. Behan himself was bisexual (although this only became widely known after his death),39 which may have contributed to this comparatively positive portrayal. Behan’s sympathetic depiction of the tenants and guests of the house mirrors his representations of his fellow young ofenders in Borstal Boy. As Benedict Kiely observes in his afterword to the book’s 1982 edition, one of the most striking things about the memoir is the warmth and humanity Behan gives to almost all of the people with whom he interacted. This is particularly striking as nearly all of them are British and therefore theoretically Behan’s enemies. In the end, in both Borstal Boy and The Hostage, individual kindness and humanity are far more important than political motivation. Both works are laments for the complicated politics and power structures of the world that impede such kindness. The ending of The Hostage exemplifes the play’s ambivalence around narratives of Irish nationalism, particularly those focusing on heroism and martyrdom. Behan could have constructed a traditionally dramatic or cathartic ending in a number of ways. Some of the house’s residents might have freed Leslie, representing a rejection of the version of Irish nationalism espoused by the current IRA (or indeed, the IRA members might have seen the error of their ways and let him go themselves). The IRA could have followed through on their promise and executed him. Leslie could have been killed in an attempt to escape, possibly being betrayed by someone in the house he had trusted. Instead of any of these serious approaches, Behan ofers an ending that more closely resembles farce and provides little emotional closure. Leslie does die, but he is shot by accident in the crossfre during a chaotic and fundamentally ridiculous raid on the house during which Whistles and sirens blow, drums beat, bombs explode, bugles sound the attack, bullets ricochet and a confusion of orders are shouted all over the place. Bodies hurtle from one side of the stage to the other and, in the midst of all the chaos, the kilted fgure of MONSEWER slow marches, serene and stately, across the stage, playing on his bagpipes a lament for the boy in Belfast Jail.40

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Indeed, the characters (and presumably much of the audience) entirely miss Leslie’s death. They only realize what has happened when some semblance of order returns and they discover his body. The last spoken lines of the play suggest a moral; Teresa rejects calls to see Leslie’s death as a political event, and instead depicts him as a lonely boy who “died in a strange land.”41 Here, at least, Behan seems to be rejecting violence in the name of nationalism in favor of a more universalizing humanist approach. Teresa’s fnal lines are followed by a song, however, and this undercuts the pathos of the ending. After her denunciation, Leslie rises (still dead) to deliver a sardonic commentary on death. He sings: “The bells of hell, / Go ting-a-ling-aling, / For you but not for me, / Oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling? / Or grave thy victory?”42 The ditty subverts the serious language of the Bible,43 again rejecting the idea that Leslie’s death has a larger meaning (including as a tragedy that points us toward pacifsm).

Conclusion More than any other Irish playwright of the mid-twentieth century, Behan revealed the profound stagnation and disappointment in the generation after Ireland threw of the shackles of imperial subjectivity. Kiberd says of Behan that his writing reveals the familiar oppressions of the emergent Irish state and interrogates the subject of Irish nationhood.44 Both The Quare Fellow and The Hostage dramatize the ways independence failed to efect signifcant change. By setting his plays in distinct and marginal spaces where everyday Irish citizens struggle, Behan brought aspects of the theatre of the absurd movement to bear on Irish drama. With distinct echoes of earlier twentieth-century Irish nationalist drama from such giants as Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey, Behan also developed a new kind of Irish theatre that had the power to acknowledge the letdown and constriction of independence. The Quare Fellow and The Hostage provided models for refashioning important Irish political fgures. In The Quare Fellow, Behan suggests that enforcers of state systems are problematic regardless of whether they are British or Irish. In The Hostage, he reconciles adversaries of the Civil War by presenting Collins and de Valera as fellow victims of pragmatism. In both, he undermines the promises of not only independence but also ongoing partisanship by showing that neither home rule nor reunifcation of Ulster with Ireland can produce harmony for the Irish people. He illustrates that only the Irish people can do that in their everyday lives by creating community and taking care of one another. The relationship between Ireland and the concept of empire is complicated. Scholars continue to debate the extent to which it is useful to consider Ireland “post-colonial.” Whatever the verdict on this question, there are ways in which Ireland has followed the trajectory of other countries who have broken away from empires. Behan’s work can be aligned with Franz Fanon’s observations about the role of national identity before and after independence. As Fanon notes, a specifc, hegemonic national identity can be a powerful tool for an independence

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movement. This was certainly the case in Ireland, where institutions like the Gaelic League and the Abbey Theatre helped to create a sense of an Irish national consciousness by promoting specifc notions of what it meant to be Irish. After independence, however, Fanon notes that the “national bourgeoisie” often step in to fll the systems vacated by the colonizers. As a result, very little changes for those without money or power. This is the version of Irish independence that Behan presents in both The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. Counter to the narrative put forward by de Valera and others in power, Behan suggested that the repressions once exerted by the British state had not been eliminated. Instead, they were being imposed now by the Irish state.

Notes 1 Mary Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 9. 2 Shaun Richards, “Plays of (Ever) Changing Ireland,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 3 Brian Mercer Walker, A Political History of the Two Irelands: From Partition to Peace (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4 Qtd in Richards, “Plays of (Ever) Changing Ireland,” 6. 5 Richards, “Plays of (Ever) Changing Ireland,” 5–6. 6 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 517. 7 See, for example, Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Stephen Watt, “Love and Death: A Reconsideration of Behan and Genet,” in A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage, eds. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 130–145. 8 Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 139. 9 Cormac Ó. Gráda, “The Irish Economy Half a Century Ago.” UCD Centre for Economic Research Working Paper Series, 2008. Accessed 13 July 2018. www.ucd. ie/economics/research/papers/2008/WP08.18.pdf. 10 Robert Welch and Bruce Stewart, eds., The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 534–535. 11 Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre, 132. 12 Brendan Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” in Behan: The Complete Plays, ed. Alan Simpson (London: Methuen, 1978), 120. 13 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 60–61. 14 Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre, 10. 15 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 59. 16 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 78. 17 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 49. 18 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 73 and 74. 19 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 62 and 63. 20 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 514. 21 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 95. 22 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 95. 23 Keibard, Inventing Ireland, 518. 24 Richard Cave, Irish Theatre in England (Wicklow: Carysfort Press Limited, 2007), 99. 25 Cave, Irish Theatre in England, 98. 26 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 82. 27 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 518.

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28 For a more detailed discussion of the diferences between the two texts, see Richard Wall, “An Giall and the Hostage Compared.” Modern Drama 18, no. 2 (1975): 165–172. 29 Brendan Behan, “The Hostage,” in Behan: The Complete Plays, ed. Alan Simpson (London: Methuen, 1978), 204. 30 Behan, “The Hostage,” 160. 31 Behan, “The Hostage,” 131. 32 Behan, “The Hostage,” 161. 33 Behan, “The Hostage,” 235. 34 Behan, “The Hostage,” 145. 35 Behan, “The Hostage,” 163. 36 Behan, “The Hostage,” 217. 37 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 525. 38 Behan, “The Hostage,” 223. 39 See, for example: Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1997). 40 Behan, “The Hostage,” 232. 41 Behan, “The Hostage,” 236. 42 Behan, “The Hostage,” 236. 43 The lyrics are a play on 1 Corinthians 15:55, which in the King James Bible is translated as “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” 44 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 529.

6 NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETHCENTURY DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN TURKISH THEATRE AND THE PURSUIT OF IDENTITY Elif Bas¸

While Turkish political issues have been widely studied and debated, Turkish theatre has received very little attention in the international feld. This may be due to the fact that Turkish theatre has been in search of a unique voice ever since its encounter with Western theatre. Theatre professor and practitioner Yavuz Pekman states that “the identity of Turkish theatre” has been the major issue of discussion among theatre intellectuals since the Tanzimat period when Western theatre was frst introduced.1 Even in the new millennium, Turkish scholars such as Aslıhan Ünlü in her article “Tiyatromuzda ‘Kimlik Sorunu’ Üzerine Düşünceler” (“Some thoughts on the ‘problem of identity’ in our theatre”) discuss the lack of identity in Turkish theatre.2 In order to understand the identity debate, this article examines the evolution of Turkish theatre in the light of signifcant political developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Turkey’s Westernization process and its establishment as a sovereign Republic independent from the Ottoman Empire was turbulent, and the progress in the feld of theatre was not consistent due to recurring political troubles. This article puts forth the fact that theatre became one of the fundamental agents in implanting the ideals of the new Republic. The ruling elites, however, supported the use of Western theatre instead of traditional theatre of the Ottoman Empire for their purposes as their primary aspiration was to “substitute Turkish nationalism for Islam and Ottomanism,”3 and “manufacture4 a Turkish national consciousness, which was non-existent before, relied on rejecting the Ottoman past. The general characteristics of traditional theatre, which will be discussed hereafter, also made it difcult for its use in spreading the values of the new Republic. Consequently, instead of making use of traditional theatre in creating a unique voice,

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traditional theatre was demolished and when Western Turkish theatre lost its function as an ideological tool in the 1950s,5 it faced a signifcant identity crisis.

Traditional Forms of Theatre during the Ottoman Rule Before exploring the emergence of Western theatre during the Ottoman rule and its role in the early years of the Republic, it is helpful to look at the characteristics of the three most popular types of traditional theatre in order to understand why they were unserviceable to the government and to recognize how much of a departure the new Western-infuenced theatre was from traditional theatre. Karagöz is a traditional Turkish shadow theatre that revolves around two main characters: Karagöz and Hacivat. The shadows of the two-dimensional fgures are cast on a white translucent screen. The puppeteer holds the fgures against the screen with rods and uses a source of light to make fgures look like stained glass. The puppet master has to be quite skillful in that he has to speak loquaciously, switch back and forth using diferent voices, imitate various other sounds, and sing as he simultaneously operates the puppets.6 Karagöz consists of mainly three parts and a short conclusion. There is no linear plot and all three parts are autonomous. The performance revolves around the confict between Karagöz and Hacivat. Though foolish, Karagöz is always able to deceive Hacivat and others. He imitates Hacivat’s language and “builds on them many crude indecencies and puns in which the Turkish language is exceedingly rich.” 7 This creates incessant laughter among the audience, which is one of the fundamental characteristics of karagöz. Most of the other comic scenes arise from verbal playfulness, political satire, and secondary characters who speak in diferent dialects. Various ethnic groups and their dialects are an indispensable part of the shadow play.8 Meddah was another popular traditional entertainment during the Ottoman Empire. Meddah is an Arabic word that means “eulogist,” although it is used in general to mean a storyteller who uses mimicry.9 A meddah impersonates various characters and changes his voice and pronunciation accordingly. Some meddahs are said to have a repertoire of more than a hundred stories,10 which they take from various epics, tales, and legends, or simply from observations from their daily lives. Their stories are full of comic incidents about diferent characters. Because the meddah had little time to change costume for imitations, he merely changed his headdress.11 He also held a thick cudgel in his hand and wore a handkerchief around his neck. The cudgel helped him imitate various sounds and was also used for visual efects.12 Throughout the performance, meddahs would closely interact with the audience and recount the stories from memory. They would constantly modify or change details depending on the reactions of the audience, so the same story could evolve in a totally diferent direction in each performance. Meddahs were not mere narrators of stories, but rather more like solo performers.13 They would end their performance by telling their audience that what they had watched was merely a story and asked for their forgiveness for the mistakes that they had made.14

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The third fundamental type of traditional theatre is orta oyunu, which means “the play in the middle.” The performers act in an open circular space surrounded by the audience. There is no raised platform and the stage is not distinctly separated from the audience. Meydan (the square) is the main acting area. This area creates no illusion for the audience. There are only two objects that serve as décor on the square: dükkan (the shop) and yeni dünya (new world), which is a folding screen that often represents a house.15 Orta oyunu is divided into four parts, and similar to karagöz, the four parts are not interrelated. Similar to meddah and karagöz shadow theatre, orta oyunu is based on comedy. Many of the comic elements transpire spontaneously as orta oyunu has no written text, and the performers improvise according to premeditated plots, which are handed down from the masters to their students. The two main characters of this non-illusionistic performance are Pişekar and Kavuklu who are similar to the characters Hacivat and Karagöz. Pişekar is the clever one who leads the performance and rarely leaves the stage. The character Kavuklu, whose name means the one “with a large wadded hat,” is the comic one.16 The rhetorical contest between Pişekar and Kavuklu requires fawless verbal craftsmanship. The other characters represent various ethnic groups, and this allows for the performers to imitate various dialects, which leads to miscommunication, misunderstandings, and comedy. As is seen, the three types of traditional theatre were not based on a text. They relied on improvisation and, instead of a linear plot, were all composed of autonomous parts. Comedy was at the core of these plays. Though there were various techniques that were used for comic efect, misunderstandings between various ethnic groups were crucial in creating laughter. These qualities will be reconsidered in the next section in evaluating the usefulness of traditional theatre during the early years of the Republic. Traditional theatre remained popular with the masses during the nineteenth century; however, a group of intellectuals became highly critical partly because they believed that traditional theatre would hinder the development of Western theatre. They also asserted that traditional theatre was full of obscenity and extreme licentiousness. Some foreign observers had expressed their astonishment at seeing women and children at such obscene performances. The phallus, for example, was an ordinary part of the karagöz show. This seems to be an ancient quality of shadow theatre as it is even said that the large movable arm of Karagöz was originally a phallus.17 Thus some critics considered these plays as vulgar entertainment that taught nothing to society. Namık Kemal, editor of the newspaper İbret, prominent intellectual, and a writer who greatly contributed to the Westernization of Turkish literature, vehemently supported this view. In one of his letters, he writes how unscrupulous these plays are: You know the situation of orta oyunu. These are at best a refection of how morally corrupt the society is … Many civilized countries also stage plays, written by respected playwrights but none of them include such

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repugnant and explicitly shameful words in their plays. Most of them serve to enlighten and enhance morality … But our plays are so lewd that let alone staging them in our neighbourhood they can’t even be staged in the cofeehouse of frefghters.18 Kemal asserted the need to establish a new Western type of theatre but did not dismiss the function of theatre as entertainment. On the contrary, he believed that theatre is “above all entertainment,” but he added that it should be “serviceable for the society” and promote “serviceable entertainment.”19 Others defended traditional theatre and wrote about its importance. A prominent journalist Teodor Kasap defended traditional theatre in an article in Diyojen, writing that “theatre is essential as civilization but just as civilization emerges from within; theatre cannot be created through outer forces, it can only emerge by our inner means.”20 Popular magazines and newspapers of the Tanzimat period such as Şark, Basiret, Medeniyet, Hayal, and Diyojen were flled with articles discussing the state of orta oyunu. Some disparaged it altogether whereas others claimed orta oyunu only needed reform. The general population seemed indiferent to the ongoing debate over the merits of traditional theatre. In 1874 Kahkaha magazine published an article, which highlighted the choices of the ordinary people: In order to watch orta oyunu and karagöz, many people go out on frosty rainy nights in winter holding an umbrella in one hand and a lantern in the other, standing out against storms and muddy streets and taking the risk of falling into pits or sewers or being attacked by dogs. They walk for ffteen, thirty minutes or even an hour to reach Direklerarası or Gedikpaşa Theatre soaking wet, mud dripping of their pants. They sit on worn out stools swarming with people reeking of dampness and cigarette smoke. And they even pay for all this, what else but to get a little laugh out of the performance?21 The majority of people may have been swarming to performances of orta oyunu, meddah, and karagöz, while there were others who were also interested in the newly emerging Western theatre. The debate among intellectuals however deepened throughout the nineteenth century and traditional theatre was eliminated as Western theatre became a prominent ideological tool after the establishment of the Republic in 1923.

Introduction of Western Theatre The development of Western theatre in Turkey coincides with the Tanzimat period (1839–1876), a time when signifcant political, economic, and educational reforms were carried out to modernize and Westernize the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-eighteenth century, the empire had lost considerable power and this

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led the reformist sultans and elites to look to European models. Although sultans Selim III and Mahmud II both introduced reforms to the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was during the Tanzimat period that the changes became more consequential. The frst notable transformation began in 1839 when Sultan Abdülmecid issued an edict known as Tanzimat Fermanı. Soon after, another reform edict was issued in 1856, and the frst constitution took efect in 1908. Consequently, Ottoman life altered in many areas: “The changes ranged from the adoption of Western theatre plays and music to full legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims and, among a few of the elite, to calls for equality for women and for representative government.”22 This immense transformation was not triggered by the demands of the public; rather, the reforms were implemented by ruling elites, which is a recurring theme in Turkish history.23 This period of Westernization greatly infuenced the fate of traditional theatre, as most of the pro-Western intellectuals exclusively favored Western theatre and rejected traditional theatre. During the Tanzimat period, many of the sultans took great interest in Western forms of entertainment. Those who could speak French attended plays that were staged by French theatre companies. Some hosted foreign companies in their palace to watch various performances. The reformist Abdülmecid helped bring Western theatre to the empire. He attended French plays that were performed in public theatres24 and supported the reconstruction of Naum Theatre, which had been damaged by a fre in 1846. He later commissioned a private theatre in his new grand palace in Dolmabahçe. Completed in 1859, the Dolmabahçe Palace Theatre was the frst theatre built by the imperial state,25 and during the reign of Abdülmecid, it became a stage for many foreign operas and plays. Several other factors contributed to the development of Western theatre. Foreign ambassadors, especially the French and Italian ambassadors, were greatly interested in theatre, and some even built theatre buildings inside their embassies; this meant that foreign theatre companies that visited and stayed in Istanbul could give regular performances. Statesmen and Turkish ambassadors who were exposed to Western theatre when they were in European cities also supported the development of theatre. However, among all the factors, Armenians were the driving force in establishing Western theatre in the Ottoman Empire. The very frst theatre performances in Istanbul began in 1810 in Armenian schools and were performed solely for the Armenian community.26 These amateur performances continued for some time, and beginning in 1858, a group of Armenians performed plays in Turkish for the frst time. Several years later they began to stage plays in Turkish regularly at the Gedikpaşa Theatre.27 It is through Armenian theatre practitioners that Western theatre extended beyond the walls of the palace and became accessible to the public. The press also helped Western theatre to fourish. Newspapers were greatly interested in theatre performances, especially because some journalists were also playwrights.28 Namık Kemal was also a playwright. His most famous play Vatan Yahut Silistre (Fatherland or Silistria) had a tremendous impact on audiences. What

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is signifcant about this play is that it explicitly demonstrated how theatre could have a major impact on people, and even infuence the direction of politics. The events surrounding the frst production of the play demonstrate the political power that Western theatre could have. The performance, which took place at the Gedikpaşa Theatre on April 1, 1873, was overfowing with people as Kemal’s fame had attracted many intellectuals, ministers, viziers, government ofcials, writers, and students. The intense patriotic tirades at the beginning of the play followed by emotional outbursts and applause were exhilarating for the audience. After the performance, the audience was so excited they called for Kemal to come out onto stage, but he had already left the theatre. A group of ffty people gathered and walked from the Gedikpaşa Theatre to Kemal’s ofce at İbret newspaper in Beyoğlu. While Kemal was not there that night,29 the crowd was infamed with patriotic fervor from the play and they shouted and cheered in the streets, “Kemal Bey çok yaşa!” (Long live Kemal!), “Muradımız nedir?” (What is our wish?) “Muradımız budur.” (Here is our wish!), “Allah muradımızı versin” (May God grant our wish!). The word “wish” was murad, which was the name of the prince they were supporting, thus the implications were clear: they wanted Murad to replace Abdülaziz, the existing sultan.30 The next day the newspapers İbret and Basiret wrote about the incident. The authorities were greatly displeased by this public outcry and closed the İbret and arrested Kemal and exiled him to Cyprus.31 Kemal’s arrest and exile were not just a consequence of Vatan Yahut Silistre; the play and patriotic demonstrations were directly related to the Turkish nationalist movement called the Young Ottomans. Kemal belonged to this underground political group, which was formed in the summer of 1865 by a group of six young intellectuals. These men, who had acquired a Western education and who were all well acquainted with the European political systems, were unhappy about the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and its loss of power. They believed that the empire would gain strength only by constitutional representation and by implementing further reforms, and they had resolved to take action against the recent policies of the Ottoman government headed by two viziers Ali Paşa and Fuad Paşa. They were not, however, opposed to the monarchy, although they found the ruling sultan Abdülaziz incompetent at this task. It is said that the Young Ottomans were in contact with the sultan’s bright nephew Prince Murad, who was heir to the throne.32 The events that occurred after the play were therefore not only a display of acclamation but also protests against Abdülaziz. As Sevengil points out, Many claim that Kemal was put in prison because of the play he wrote, but the play was merely used as an excuse. He was sent to Cyprus… because of his stimulating, enlightening articles in İbret that brought the ideas of freedom and constitution to the young generation.33 Thus such great enragement of the authorities ensued from the fact that the patriotic public outcry was a perspicuous refection of the grand aspirations of

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Kemal and the Young Ottomans. Kemal returned to Istanbul only after the dethronement of Abdülaziz in 1876. As noted before, Western theatre was alien to the public, even the intellectuals were newly exploring it. By using theatre as an ideological tool and showing that theatre could be a political weapon he “not only changed the course of his own life but also changed the fate of Western theatre.”34 Consequently, theatre soon became an ideological tool and its political function became even more vital after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923.

The New Republic How Turkey was transformed from the multiethnic Ottoman Empire into a secular republican nation-state is one of the most extraordinary events of the twentieth century. This new Republic emerged under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who led the War of Independence (1919–1923). Turkey underwent rapid modernization between 1923 and 1930, and a broad range of reforms in the political, social, legal, economic, and cultural spheres were carried out in a very short period of time. Sultanate, caliphate, and sheriat Islamic law were all abolished and replaced with new civil, commercial, and penal codes based on European models. A new Turkish alphabet in modifed Latin form was introduced, and women were given the right to vote and the right to hold ofce as early as 1934. While the new Republic emerged after defeating Western countries in the War of Independence, modern Turkey’s making was very much based on the “epistemic and moral dominance”35 of the West. The reforms, however, were implemented by a small group of elites and did not come from the demands or eforts of ordinary citizens. Çağlar Keyder describes this experience of modernization as a “project.” He writes, “the agency behind the project was the modernizing elite, and what they sought to achieve was the imposition of institutions, beliefs, and behaviours consonant with their understanding of modernity on the chosen object: the people of Turkey.”36 Unlike the War of Independence, which was fought with phenomenal public support, this tremendous shift to Westernize did not occur efortlessly. As Feroz Ahmet states, “Turkey, as is often suggested, did not rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It was ‘made’ in the image of the Kemalist 37 elite who won the national struggle against foreign invaders and the old regime.”38 The elites assumed that if they simply changed the circumstances, the people would follow along and adapt to these changes.39 This of course had major societal consequences. Reşat Kasaba points to indigenous oral stories that portray the early years of the twentieth century and capture the lives and the paradoxical beliefs of the Turkish peasants. These stories not only depict the poverty and the hardships of the period, but they also display “a profound crisis in identity.”40 The heroes of these stories declare their loyalty to “the sultan-caliph, Young Turk leaders, Mustafa Kemal, the Prophet Muhammed, and his nephew Ali”41 as if they were all part of one unity.

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The ruling elites used diferent means and institutions to infuence people to value and feel loyal toward the new Republic and to eliminate the conficting powers. Western theatre became one of the agents of this change. Its primary function was to support social change and to impose patriotic ideals. Theatre played a major role in disseminating ideas because the majority of the population was illiterate and the theatre was the only means to confer values. Theatre became what Louis Althusser called an “ideological state apparatus,”42 a pivotal tool used by the state to circulate its national principles. One of the frst steps to popularize Western theatre in Turkey was to enhance the Darülbedayi, which was the frst state conservatory established in 1914. The supporters of Darülbedayi aspired to create a national theatre, and appointed André Antoine, a prominent French director, theatre manager, and critic to direct the theatre department. A foreigner was hired because the ruling elites wanted the school to teach and perform only Western theatre. Even though the music department taught both Western and traditional music, the theatre department practiced exclusively Western theatre.43 Özdemir Nutku points out that Darülbedayi was fawed from the beginning because of the disregard for traditional theatre. Darülbedayi was a great chance for the state to support traditional theatre but it was dismissed altogether.44 This meant that everything had to be established from scratch. Antoine states in a letter written to his friend on July 28, 1914, that Turkish ofcials had asked him to establish a theatre school in the French style, but he adds “they have no actors, instructors, students, designers or even theatres. And I’m working to get all of them ready by October the frst.”45 Because of the eruption of World War I, the plans were delayed, but Darülbedayi began as a performing arts school comprised of a theatre company that gave regular performances after 1915. Even so, Western theatre, which emerged over centuries, was being incorporated into Turkish culture at an impossible pace. Building a performing arts school and training actors was the less painful part of this abrupt process; adapting all other elements, such as training playwrights in the conventions of Western theatre and developing an audience for this type of theatre, was more arduous. The plays staged by Darülbedayi were mostly written by Western playwrights. In a 1923 interview to the magazine Yeni Mecmua, playwright Reşat Nuri Güntekin noted that ffty plays were staged in Darülbedayi in eight years, and out of these, only twelve were written by Turkish playwrights. He said that Darülbedayi received many Turkish plays to be considered, but the majority of them are rejected. He added that if only 2 percent of the Turkish plays are worth staging, the instructors at Darülbedayi consider themselves lucky.46 Things were not very diferent even after state theatres were established in 1949. During the frst ten years, state theatres staged a total of 117 plays. Out of these only 44 of them were written by Turkish playwrights.47 This was the natural result of trying to quickly adapt the centuries-old Western theatre tradition without drawing from traditional forms of Turkish entertainment. Another major concern at the beginning of the twentieth century was how to develop an audience for this new Western style of theatre. Although people

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attended the new, alien performances, they were still unfamiliar with its customs. Prominent actor and director Muhsin Ertuğrul and other intellectuals were eager to create an audience and applied various approaches to build interest. To educate the young generation, they started to hold matinees for students on Fridays, which was a day of for most people. This proved successful.48 But the older generation, who were used to interactive and improvisational theatre, also had to learn the new customs of theatre. To familiarize audiences with the conventions of Western theatre, Muhsin Ertuğrul prepared a brochure outlining the rules of theatre, such as wearing clean clothes and not talking during the performance.49 As Metin And states, “What was expected from the audience at the beginning of this period was to watch whatever was shown to them in obedience without uttering a single word.”50 Such training was mostly possible for Istanbul audiences. There were, however, millions of people in smaller villages who were not exposed to the new Republic’s artistic endeavors. To achieve the new ideals of the Republic and appeal to people in rural areas, the ruling elite had to reach out to people living in other parts of the country. Darülbedayi organized tours to diferent cities every year until 1942 and state theatres soon joined this practice.51 This helped people living in remote areas to see Western plays, which were mainly performed at the People’s Houses. These were cultural centers that the ruling Republican Peoples’ Party started building in rural parts of Turkey in 1932. The houses served cultural and political purposes and were established when the opposition party Serbest Fırka (Free Party) had gained unexpected support and dismayed the ruling Republican People’s Party (RPP) “for it indicated that the Kemalist Revolution had not reached the hearts and minds of the people.”52 The ideals of the revolution had not been internalized as expected. Consequently, RPP decided to take new measures, and in 1932, they established the People’s Houses. The People’s Houses were built to make art and culture available to the working classes and they served a political goal: to “indoctrinate the nationalist, secularist and populist ideas of the republican regime.”53 RPP targeted rural areas because peasants made up about 80 percent of the country’s population54 and were still unfamiliar with nationalist secular ideas. The People’s Houses became one of the most fundamental agents in conveying the party’s principles. In 1950, 477 People’s Houses had been established in 63 diferent cities and 4,332 People’s Rooms (smaller versions of the houses in villages) had been established across Turkey.55 The Ministry of Education and the People’s Party distributed specifc national plays to be performed at schools and at the People’s Houses. The primary function of the plays was to appeal to the emotions of the audience; only a few had literary merit. The plays mostly centered on patriotic events, such as men fghting and giving up their lives for their country, and the fag would always make an appearance before the fnal curtain.56 Malik Evrenol recounts the atmosphere created by the theatre performances: Imagine for a moment, people in every walk of life and the absorbing enthusiastic Turkish youth gathered in school auditoriums and in the

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small theatres of the People’s Houses cheering at the top of their lungs at some patriotic or cultural scene! One cannot help but become stimulated with the rest of the crowd. You know what role crowd psychology plays! Well, it is that. These people and youth that attend the plays given by amateur theatrical groups, attend them not to amuse themselves so much or to fnd recreation, but they attend them because they have found a vitality in them; they have found contact with the leading forces of the country.57 Considering the reform of the Turkish alphabet and that the literacy rate was very low during this time, theatre was an efective medium in disseminating the ideals of the new regime. RPP calculated that a play with a strong ideological content performed in 136 People’s Houses to 136,000 people could manage to implant its ideas to these people in one or two days.58 This was unequivocally the quickest and immediate way of reaching people. Why did the elites not use traditional types of entertainment that people were already familiar with to communicate the new ideals of the new Republic? In many ways, the Ottoman past and the regulations of the old empire could not provide a foundation to the new nation; the whole substructure was constructed anew. And although some elements of the past retained their value, traditional theatre was not one of them. The process of Westernization not only inhibited the development of the traditional theatre; it wiped out its spirit altogether. Traditional theatre was not a practical ideological tool for implementing the ideals of the new nation because it did not use written texts and relied on improvisation, making it impossible to control or supervise a performance. Improvisation granted an extensive scope for performers to make decisions instantaneously. Because parameters could not be established, the performers could even end up questioning the values that were supposed to be imposed upon the audience. As Metin And states, “Karagöz dialogue is much more fearsome as it is improvised and not tied down to a written text.”59 Even though comedy is at the heart of the traditional theatre, the performances also frequently made use of political satire and were greatly dissident. Traditional theatre was funny and entertaining yet also unrestrainable. It was satirical but not enforcing. Furthermore, traditional performances did not have a linear plot. Although they followed a structure, it was a very loose structure and each part of a performance was autonomous. This meant that what the authorities wanted a traditional performance to highlight could easily get lost within such a fexible structure. There were few cases in which traditional performances were used for political purposes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the time of the reforms of Mahmud II, the meddahs played an important political role and championed the conservative party.60 Foreign witnesses mention how some meddahs were an agent of informing the public of the new decisions of the sultan or the viziers.61 The diference here is that, unlike the intellectuals of the new Republic, meddahs were only conveying messages of an established system of centuries

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and not trying to modify or impose a new set of unfamiliar values to the public. Although it was not impossible, traditional theatre was a risky choice compared to Western theatre. There was another crucial factor that made traditional theatre unsuitable for the needs of the new Republic. All three types of traditional performances relied heavily on the multiethnicity and the misunderstandings between ethnic groups for comedic efect. The Ottoman Empire was home to many diferent religious and ethnic groups including Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Kurds, Albanians, Turks, and Arabs. For centuries this heterogeneous group led a largely peaceful existence as their religious beliefs and local traditions were safeguarded through the millet system. This system was based on “a loose administrative set of central-local arrangements systematized only in the nineteenth century was a script for multi-religious rule, though it was never fully codifed, nor was it ever equivalent across communities.”62 The “religious communities were organized into autonomous, self-regulatory units,”63 which allowed “enough space, movement, and parallel alternative structures to maintain a divided, yet cohesive and tolerant imperial society.”64 Traditional theatre undeniably refected the social context of the multiethnic empire. The characters of traditional theatre were stereotypes and all were representatives of various religious and ethnic groups. Their role was indispensable in that language and miscommunication were at the core of creating laughter. This system could not be carried out after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in that Turkey was rebuilt as a nation-state, and race was at the core of its foundation. “Ethnic nationalism soon became the mainstay of ofcial Turkish ideology. In this context, the non-Muslim minorities – even though they were Turkish citizens – were clearly left out of the national community, and became technically impossible to incorporate.”65 The nation was greatly homogenized due to loss of land and various other methods. The Christian minorities were almost extinct.66 For those still remaining, “the government expected that non-Turkish Muslims would be assimilated.”67 Traditional theatre, which was greatly shaped by the multiethnic quality of the empire, did not ft well in the new Republic. The minorities could no longer serve as an element of laughter in plays; they were part of a whole new political agenda. As Sefa Şimşek points out, In Europe and Turkey, nationalism and modernization, consciously or unconsciously, repressed many ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious elements. Only after the authority of nation-states was undermined by globalization, technological advancement, and global communication, did the repressed, the marginalized, and the traditional elements begin to appear in the public sphere.68 The governing elite, therefore, could not make use of traditional theatre. The fundamental qualities of traditional theatre were not suitable for carrying out the ideals of the new Republic.

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Consequently, traditional theatre, which had begun to lose its signifcance during the last years of the Ottoman Empire with the introduction of Western theatre, faded into oblivion after the establishment of the new Republic. Even decades after this major transition, however, there was still a discussion over the state of theatre in Turkey. In 1965, Tuncay Çavdar boldly wrote about the underlying problems of Turkish theatre: Until today [Western] theatre has been forcefully diverting the nature of our people. For example, trying to teach people to watch a play in silence … The theatre that the society itself creates would never be like this. Our people want to participate and ask questions during the play without any hesitation. They want to decide who is right or wrong and, if there is something that preoccupies their mind, they want to ask right away. If the performers are singing on stage, the people want to sing along. Today our actors and directors are far from such intimacy. There is the need of a new generation of theatre practitioners who respect the wishes of the audience unconditionally and can implement their dispositions to theatre. The ordinary education of playwrights, directors, and actors should be changed altogether and other elements like theatre architecture, décor, music, should all be rearranged.69 Çavdar rightly points out the impossibility of Turkish peoples’ total adaption to a markedly distinct Western culture and refects on what kind of adjustments could have been done to fnd a more suitable voice for Turkish theatre. When modifcations were not made to accommodate Turkish culture, theatre went into a state of crisis after it no longer had an ideological duty, especially after they shut down the People’s Houses in 1951. This actually could have allowed theatre practitioners greater freedom in artistic expression but turbulent political events decelerated such progress. After the military coup d’état of 1960, for example, a new constitution that allowed more artistic freedom was adopted in 1961, and this period marked a new era for theatre practitioners. Private theatres increased in number, new young Turkish playwrights emerged, and the plays were more varied than before. Unfortunately, this thriving period was interrupted by a coup in 1971. Despite the chaotic atmosphere, artists strived for something new, and in the 1970s, they began using elements of traditional theatre in Western plays. However, another coup followed in 1980. Political developments in Turkey have always created challenges for theatre practitioners. Even recently the failed coup d’état attempt in July 2016 has caused more major turmoil in the country. These chaotic political developments have not kept exquisite playwrights, actors, or directors from emerging in Turkey. There have been numerous invaluable practitioners who have contributed greatly to Turkish theatre. However, artists have sufered extensively from the transition period at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the political unrest greatly impaired the development of Turkish theatre. This turmoil has

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inspired some artists to react, but it has paralyzed many others. And for this very reason the accomplishments of many invaluable playwrights, directors, and performers deserve even more praise. As Aslıhan Ünlü acknowledges, today, there is still a debate on identity and Turkish theatre, but Ünlü also points out that fnding a specifc identity in theatre and proclaiming its authenticity would be erroneous. She also adds that … standing against Western theatre and trying to fnd a powerful alternative should not be the aim. We should also not aim to preserve traditional theatre merely as a museum artifact. In order to explore new contents and forms, we need to decipher the cultural codes of our people (audiences) and to achieve this, interdisciplinary collaboration is essential.70 A solid collaboration can draw inspiration from the challenging historical and political events Turkey has faced over the last century. Today, especially since the new millennium, the young generation of theatre practitioners in Turkey are seeking this path and vigorously searching for new ways of artistic expression. They are confronting the past and creating space for reconciliation and healing through creativity. Considering the convoluted and unique past of the Turkish Republic, I have no doubt that their endeavor will reveal the extraordinary colors of their discordant history and unusual artistic perspective.

Notes 1 Yavuz Pekman, “Türk Tiyatrosunda Çağdaş bir Kuramcı: İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğu.” Tiyatro Eleştirmenliği ve Dramaturji Bölüm Dergisi 3 (2003): 59–75. Unless stated otherwise, all translations belong to the author. 2 Aslıhan Ünlü, “Tiyatromuzda ‘Kimlik Sorunu’ Üzerine düşünceler.” yedi 1 (2007): 36–41. 3 Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), 61. 4 Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, 78. 5 A moderately ring-wing Democratic Party took over the government after the elections of 1950. Before 1950, the Republic was a one-party state ruled by the Republican People’s Party. In her article “1950’ler ve Tiyatro Sanatının Yönelimleri” (1950s and the Trends in Theatre), Dikmen Gürün states that the Democratic Party remained distant from theatre and pursued a neutralization policy. By the end of the 1950s the focus was less on educational plays, though the intellectuals were still eagerly discussing the topic among themselves. 6 Metin And, A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey (Ankara: Forum Yayınları, 1964), 44–45. 7 Nicholas N. Martinovitch, The Turkish Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts Inc., 1933), 42. 8 Martinovitch, The Turkish Theatre, 47–65. 9 Martinovitch, The Turkish Theatre, 21. 10 Martinovitch, The Turkish Theatre, 26. 11 Martinovitch, The Turkish Theatre, 27. 12 And, A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey, 28. 13 Nutku, Meddahlık ve Meddah Hikayeleri, (Ankara, Atatürk Kültür Merkezi Başkanlığı, 1997), 55–56.

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14 And, A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey, 28. 15 Metin And, Geleneksel Türk Tiyatrosu: Köylü ve Halk Tiyatrosu Gelenekleri (İstanbul: İnkılap Yayınevi, 1985), 403. 16 Martinovich, The Turkish Theatre, 17–18 17 Metin And, Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theatre, (Ankara: Dost, 1975), 85–86. 18 Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, Namık Kemal’in Hususi Mektupları I: İstanbul, Avrupa ve Magosa Mektupları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2013), 76. 19 Kenan Akyüz, Batı Tesirinde Türk Şiiri Antolojisi (1860–1923) (İstanbul: Inkılap, 1985), 58. 20 Quoted by And, Tanzimat ve İstibdat Döneminde Türk Tiyatrosu, 272. 21 And, Geleneksel Türk Tiyatrosu, 385. 22 Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 765. 23 Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856–1876 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 7. 24 H. Malik Evrenol, Revolutionary Turkey (Ankara: Librairie Hachette, 1936), 94. 25 Refk Ahmet Sevengil, Türk Tiyatrosu Tarihi IV: Saray Tiyatrosu (İstanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1962), 18–19. 26 Metin And, 100 Soruda Türk Tiyatro Tarihi (Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınevi, 1970), 89–90. 27 Sevengil, Türk Tiyatrosu Tarihi IV, 44–47. 28 Metin And, Culture, Performance and Communication in Turkey (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Language and Culture of Asia and Africa, 1987), 159–160. 29 Refk Ahmet Sevengil, Türk Tiyatrosu Tarihi III: Tanzimat Tiyatrosu (İstanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1961), 178. 30 Sadettin Nüzhet Ergün, Namık Kemal: Hayatı ve Şiirleri (İstanbul: Yeni Şark Kitaphanesi, 1933), 62. 31 Sevengil, Türk Tiyatrosu Tarihi III, 182–187. 32 Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 10–14. 33 Sevengil, Türk Tiyatrosu Tarihi IV, 67–68. 34 Niyazi Akı, XIX. Yüzyıl Türk Tiyatrosunda Devrin Hayat ve İnsanı: Sosyopsikolojik Deneme (Erzurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1974), 9. 35 Fuat Keyman, “Global Modernity, Identity and Democracy: The Case of Turkey,” in Redefning the Nation, State and Citizen, eds. G.G. Özdoğan and G. Tokay (Istanbul: Eren, 2000), 71. 36 Çağlar Keyder, “Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990’s,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 39. 37 These elites adhered to Kemalism, which is based on the ideas and principles of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. The main principles of Kemalism are republicanism, nationalism, populism, state socialism, secularism, and revolutionism. 38 Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, ix. 39 Resat Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 24. 40 Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” 30. 41 Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” 30. 42 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso Books, 2014). 43 Özdemir Nutku, Darülbedayi’in Elli Yılı (Ankara: AÜ DTCF Yayınları, 1969), 18–19. 44 Nutku, Darülbedayi’in Elli Yılı, 20. 45 Quoted by Özdemir Nutku, Atatürk ve Cumhuriyet Tiyatrosu (İstanbul: Özgür Yayınları, 1999), 73.

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46 Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Reşat Nuri Güntekin’in Tiyatro ile İlgili Makaleleri, compiled by Kemal Yavuz (İstanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1976), 347–348. 47 Fikret Tartan, Altmışında Bir Taze II (Ankara: Devlet Tiyatroları Vakfı Yayınları, 1998), 309–313. 48 Vasf Rıza Zobu, “Tiyatro Hatıraları, Seyirci Yetiştirmek İçin.” Türk Tiyatrosu 323 ( January 1960): 9. 49 Zobu, “Tiyatro Hatıraları, Seyirci Yetiştirmek İçin,” 9. 50 Metin And, 50 Yılın Türk Tiyatrosu (İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 1973), 33. 51 Metin And, Başlangıçtan 1983’e Türk Tiyatro Tarihi (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2006), 165. 52 M. Asim Karaömerlioğlu, “The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in Turkey.” Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 4 (1998): 68. 53 Kemal H. Karpat, “The Impact of the People’s Houses on the Development of Communication in Turkey: 1931–1951.” Die Welt des Islams 15, no. 1/4 (1974): 69. 54 Karaömerlioğlu, “The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in Turkey,” 69. 55 And, 50 Yılın Türk Tiyatrosu, 66. 56 And, 50 Yılın Türk Tiyatrosu, 188–189. 57 Evrenol, Revolutionary Turkey, 99–100. 58 Neşe G. Yeşilkaya, Halkevleri: İdeoloji ve Mimarlık (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1999), 94. 59 And, Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theatre, 83. 60 Martinovich, The Turkish Theatre, 23. 61 Quoted by And, Geleneksel Türk Tiyatrosu, 83. 62 Karen Barkey, “Islam and Toleration: Studying the Ottoman Imperial Model.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 1–2 (2005): 16. 63 Barkey, “Islam and Toleration,” 16. 64 Barkey, “Islam and Toleration,” 15. 65 Ayhan Aktar, “Homogenising the Nation, Turkifying the Economy,” in Crossing the Aegean, An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Exchange between Greece and Turkey, ed. Renée Hirschon (Oxford: Berghan Books, 2003), 94. 66 Hans Kohn, “Ten Years of the Turkish Republic.” Foreign Afairs 12, no. 1 (1933): 145. 67 Soner Cagaptay, “Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish Nationalism and the Minorities in the 1930s.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 3 (2004): 87. 68 Sefa Şimşek, “New Social Movements in Turkey Since 1980.” Turkish Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 119. 69 Tuncay Çavdar, “Tiyatroda Açık Düzen.” Oyun 19 (February 1965): 22. 70 Ünlü, “Tiyatromuzda ‘Kimlik Sorunu’ Üzerine Düşünceler,” 39.

7 TOWARD A NEW AFRICAN PERSONALITY The National Theatre Movement of Ghana from Nkrumah to Rawlings David Afriyie Donkor

This essay examines the National Theatre Movement of Ghana (NTM) that emerged in the aftermath of direct British imperialism in Ghana in the 1950s. At the NTM’s birth it had a mission (assigned it by the soon-to-be leaders of the emergent independent nation) to help restore what pan-African intellectual Edward Blyden called the “African personality.” Leaders argued that theatre could emancipate African subjects from what colonial ideology allegedly had made them: a “psycho-culturally impaired personality” that continued to prostrate its “self-and-world” before that of the erstwhile colonizer. By looking at the roots and work of the NTM, and by interrogating both the scholars who said that it was “dead from the start” and those who valued it as an enduring cultural legacy, I show that the NTM did sufer from elitism and from contestations over boundaries between art and ideology that made it appear moribund by the 1970s. Nevertheless, in the 1990s and 2000s, the regime in Ghana found it necessary to revive this “dead horse” (to cite the NTM as a basis of its cultural policy), not only an indication that a counter-colonial impulse remained a basis of Ghanaian political legitimacy long after independence but also a reminder that theatre continued to be connected to a post-independence cultural nationalist emancipatory discourse in the country, even if just rhetorically.

Nkrumah and the African Personality Kwame Nkrumah, the frst prime minister of Ghana, believed that colonialism stunted the development of our African personality, a concept that he inherited from Blyden, a Liberian clergyman and scholar. Blyden believed in the distinctiveness of human races, arguing that each race has its own “personality,” i.e., its unique, enduring, moral-cultural, and intellectual characteristics. In Blyden’s enunciation, the African personality, that is, the unique personality of the

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“Negro race,” refected the “milder aspects of human nature—such as spontaneity, goodwill, and a powerful spiritual element.” A fundamental communality characterized this personality and manifested in Africans’ value for cooperation and mutual aid.1 Blyden’s idea of the African personality arose in his polemic with social Darwinist British anthropologists who made their case for colonial expansion by theorizing that every race evolved from a lower one in a hierarchy of races with “Negro peoples” at the bottom and Europeans at the top. Blyden accepted the idea of racial distinctions but took it to a diferent conclusion, challenging the anthropologist’s white supremacist thesis with the counter-thesis that races are distinct but equal and complementary, that no scale of achievement places a “race” above another but, rather, each race has its own “personality” to contribute to civilization.2 He saw colonialism as a “mortal danger” to the African personality because the “harsh, individualist, competitive … combative” and “egoistic” personality of the European stood in sharp contrast to the mild, communal, cooperative features of the African personality. Colonialism thus strikes at the heart of indigenous African cultural institutions, from art to rituals, customs and social and political organization, undermining the morale and confdence that the African might exude at the full expression of his personality. As Blyden put it, the African personality is “the soul of the African race,” and “the soul of the race fnds expression in its institutions” so “to kill those institutions is to kill the soul—a terrible homicide.” For Blyden, colonial education is a principal weapon of the “terrible homicide.” It chips away at the African personality by alienating the African from his cultural institutions. Blyden explained that Europeans did not design colonial education to bring out the genius of the African personality but to present the African as “a funny, inept creature,” implant in him an “inferiority complex,” and render him an “inadequate copy rather than equal” to the European.3 Alienated by colonial education from his cultural institutions and, therefore, from the African personality, the African sufers a psychic ambivalence that destroys his morale and damages his confdence. Blyden was convinced that, to prevent the destructive psychological outcomes of his colonial subjection, the African’s “main task” was to preserve the distinctive features of the African personality—the communalism, cooperation, spontaneity, goodwill, and spirituality—by safeguarding the institutions of African culture through any means. He insisted that, by pursuing the civilization, he has developed apart from Europe’s infuence—his time-honored, time-tested ideas, outlooks, and customs—the African would thrive secure in the knowledge of their merit as unique elements of African culture and genius and confdent of his distinctive, positive contribution to human progress.4 In essence, Blyden “constructed a shield of cultural nationalism to repulse the assault of European cultural imperialism,” maintaining that Africa could rise to its ordained heights only through its own cultural and educational institutions.5 He was convinced that only in a state of unity with one another would Africans be able to preserve

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and express the African personality. Therefore, he called on Africans to merge into one “great, strong, populous and prospering state.”6 Nkrumah echoed Blyden by holding that “the personality and conscience of Africa” is rooted in communalism: in a “duty to support one another and make the happiness of others a condition for the happiness of oneself.” 7 He, also, believed that colonial education suppressed cultural institutions foundational to the African personality. It denied the African knowledge of his past, informed him he had no present, taught him to regard his culture “as barbarous and primitive,” and made him an inferior copy of Englishmen, “caricatures to be laughed at with our pretensions to British bourgeois gentility.”8 He believed that Africa could “redeem its past glory” and “renew its strength…in a new era of prosperity and power” by preserving indigenous cultural institutions. In his words, “it is vital that we should nurture our own culture and history if we are to develop the African personality.”9 Also, like Blyden, he held that “A union of African States … will make possible the full expression of the African personality.”10 For Nkrumah, the African personality not only preceded the cultural infuence of Europe. It also demonstrated an ambitious synthesis by serving as an authentic agent of African modernity, “a factor to be reckoned with in the international community.” We see this in his speech on the eve of Ghana’s independence, when he declared that Ghanaians were going to create their own African personality and show the world their capability for self-government—that the “African is capable of handling his own afairs.”11 As Nkrumah saw it, the particularities of Ghanaian culture did not yet properly ft under the umbrella of the African personality. Ghanaians could boast of a rich indigenous expressive culture that preceded colonization. Yet the efects of colonialism, particularly colonial education, had endured in Ghanaian society. Even after independence, many Ghanaians still articulated their selves-and-worlds in colonial terms, i.e., with a mindset that scorns the indigenous cultural institutions of the country. Thus Nkrumah saw political sovereignty as an important frst step but not something that necessarily results in the full fowering of the African personality. There was need for a second step—a “cultural ontological revolution” of a sort that would blossom the personality by raising the African from his prostration to discourses (and representations) of the departed colonizer and giving him proper regard for his heritage.12 The NTM was Nkrumah’s project to shatter the colonial mentality and restore the African personality through the arts.

The National Theatre Movement In 1954, as Gold Coast (Ghana’s colonial name before March 1957) approached its political independence from British colonial rule, Nkrumah’s transitional all-African government sought to establish a national theatre movement in the country. Toward this, the government’s Ministry of Education approached the British Council, a cultural-educational organization, to look into the possibility of such a movement in the country. The Council recommended, for this

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purpose, a committee to explore the prospect of promoting and developing arts appreciation, and of fostering and preserving “traditional arts and culture,” in Gold Coast. The Ministry heeded this and appointed a committee in 1955.13 The committee reported that “the main responsibility for reviving the dying culture” of Gold Coast “lay with the people [of the country] themselves,” but they “were too engrossed in other things to realize the threat to their traditional culture” so the government must “take the initiative.”14 It proposed the construction of a national theatre and the establishment of an Arts Council along the lines of that in Britain, i.e., as a statutory publicly funded body “to organize the arts and encourage their promotion.” In June 1955, the government set up an Interim Committee for an Arts Council (ICAC) to draw up “realistic proposals with cost estimates for a national theater movement” and carry out such proposals until such a more permanent arts council could be formed.15 The ICAC envisioned a “national theatre movement” that refected the ambitious synthesis of indigenous heritage and globally oriented modernity present in Nkrumah’s idea of the African personality. Advocates of the NTM did not often use the phrase African personality but were well aware of it, as we see in the words of advocate Kwabena Nketia that the African personality was “at once liberating and creative, bringing into focus African alternatives to Western values and institutions.” He adds that it stood to “combat the claim to the universality of Western culture” with “an African alternative” that asserted “a valid African civilization, both at home and abroad.”16 The absence of Nkrumah’s exact vocabulary in its language notwithstanding the ICAC envisioned a movement that “refects the traditional heritage” but is a “living force…acclaimed by the modern Ghana”: a movement “frmly rooted in the past” and “aware of the trends in dramatic expression elsewhere” but drawing “strength and support from the people of Ghana.”17 Basically, it sought “to bring into existence a modern theatre that will derive its vitality and authenticity from roots frmly planted in the true traditions of the people.”18 More than two years after its formation, the ICAC had not provided a fnal report for government consideration. In parliamentary debates, A. Casely-Hayford pressed the Minister of Education C.T. Nylander about what the “cultural policy” of the government was in order to ensure the preservation and demonstration “of the character and traditions of the people of Ghana,” and where (and when) the government intended “to erect a National Theatre.”19 Nylander assured the Member of Parliament of the government’s keen interest in the cultural policy and that sites for a building were under consideration but the government was awaiting the ICAC’s fnal report to consider all details. He hoped that in the next year a “statutory Arts Council” would replace the ICAC. In December 1958, Parliament passed an Act “to establish an Arts Council for … promoting and developing appreciation of art and, in particular, preserving and fostering the traditional arts and culture of Ghana.”20 In April 1959, the Act took efect. The Arts Council had eight stipulated duties, including “establish, maintain and manage a National Theatre.”21 It created advisory panels for music, drama,

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and literature; gave grants, bursaries, and scholarships to promising artists for further studies; ofered arts and cultural organizations that shared its aims the privilege of afliation; and provided free classes for the public to learn and participate in Ghanaian performing arts. Furthermore, it worked with artists and community leaders to establish “Theatre Movement Committees” and held annual competitions for performing arts groups “to keep the National Theatre Movement alive.”22 Over “the frst phase” of the NTM (1956–1963), amateur drama groups, including dramatist Efua Sutherland’s Experimental Theatre Players in 1958, emerged across the country in secondary and professional training schools; religious associations (YMCA and YWCA); and public service institutions, such as those concerned with adult education.23 In 1960, the Ghanaian government set up an Advisory Committee for the Construction of a National Theatre. The identarian goals of the NTM (i.e., the type of image of Ghanaian life that they were trying to portray) were never explicitly spelt out by either the Arts Council or the committees set out to advance the movement, except in the general terms of the Ghanaian, who is an agent of modernity but well versed in his indigenous cultural practices and institutions that preceded colonization. It seems that such goals were something expected to unfold as practitioners worked them out in their own various ways. Thus, it is by looking at some of the plays that came out of the NTM that we might see something of the desirable—and undesirable— identarian goals of the NTM. One of such plays was Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool written by Michael Dei-Annang, one-time advisor to Nkrumah and debuted in 1961 for a Festival of Music and Drama organized by the Arts Council. The play draws upon eighteenth-century Asante history and legend to inspire nationalist pan-African consciousness and unity. It is built around the founding of the Asante nation under King Osei Tutu and his priest Anokye. A “chorus,” linking the play with the NTM’s aim to rework tradition into a suitable modernity, apologizes to the “ancestors” for addressing them in English but admits an imperative to reach a diverse audience in a language “bereft of native wit.”24 Still, the play highlights the need to restore a sense of identity confounded by colonization. When Anokye’s uncle complains that “our customs” grow “confused” each day a “villager” blames an “odd” colonial education for the African’s obfuscated sense of self and world.”25 In a divinely ordained role, Anokye commands a Golden Stool from the skies, declaring it “a celestial mark of power and unity” that will “bind the separate tribes into one frm trunk of majesty and power.”26 The Golden Stool serves as a metaphor of Ghana (formerly called Gold Coast). It posits Ghana, glittering with the glory of its recuperated history and traditions, as the seat of unity that will “bind” the “factious” African states into a “phalanx of power” so that they can rediscover and embody “power and sovereignty.”27 Another NTM milestone in 1961 was the opening of the Ghana Drama Studio, founded by playwright Efua Sutherland with funds from Ghanaian government, the Arts Council, and the Farfeld and Rockefeller foundations.28 Sutherland’s plays Foriwa and Edufa—which dramatize a suppression of the

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African personality and the possibilities for its full fowering—debuted at the Studio. Foriwa exemplifes the NTM’s proposal to imbue tradition with modern contemporary signifcance by drawing on traditional folklore, ritual, ceremony, and festival, to divest tradition from connotations of dormancy, conservatism, and stale repetition, and show it as a site for re-imagination, renewal, and transformation. It is about the “dawn of consciousness” in a town whose inhabitants’ debilitative parochialism ultimately gives way to a broad, inclusive, modern, progressive, united, and truly “communal” society. Edufa, a reworking of Euripedes’ Alcestis, refects Sutherland’s ability to adapt non-African elements to service an African theatre idiom. Prosperous but insecure, Edufa obtains a charm to thwart a diviner’s forecast of his death, a charm that only works by substituting Edufa’s death with that of whoever declares the most love for him. His wife becomes the substitute and unsuccessfully tries to reverse the charm. Edufa is the tragedy of a self-confessed “emancipated” man but whose so-called emancipation through colonial education takes the form of cultural alienation and destructive individualism that makes him insecure to the point that he violates the indigenous values of his community.29 By 1962 “theatre in Ghana could be said to be fourishing.”30 The School of Music and Drama (1962) and Institute of African Studies (1963) opened at the University of Ghana, the main public research university. The School ofered “university courses in music, dance and drama” as well as applied African arts research opportunities alongside “a focus…for the performing arts.” It helped to provide the NTM “intellectual, artistic and technical leadership.”31 The Institute aimed to produce knowledge and, more generally, to “stimulate creative activity” in Ghana.32 Nkrumah hoped that close association of the School with the Institute would “link the University” and NTM “to develop new forms of drama…that are at the same time closely related to Ghanaian traditions and… express” Ghanaian’s ideas aspirations and aspirations.33 As one of the founding researchers at the Institute J.H. Nketsia noted, the NTM was called a movement not because it was to be an “idea shared by individuals, who would act on it … It was called a movement because it…inspired and brought people with certain talents in the arts, experimenting and working together.”34 I would be remiss not to mention a collaboration between Sutherland and people of the village of Ekumf-Atwia in Ghana to construct Kodzidan (“House of Stories/Storytelling”), a community theatre building for experimental performance focused on the traditional storytelling of the Akan people (Ghanaian ethno-linguistic group). Construction—with labor by people of the village— began in 1965 and was completed in 1966.35 In 1965 Efua Sutherland, a member of the Arts Council, studied the frst decade of the movement for “important lessons…to help shape plans and direct efort for the second phase.”36 She concluded that “central to all other problems” the NTM faced was “the need for creative material.” It sufered a disquieting slowdown in creative output due to strained personnel resources. She also felt the NTM was “not as much in interaction with responses, interests and opinions of the general public” as it could be because

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convenience and fnance kept a “greater number of theatre performances” in Accra to the “neglect” of areas outside the capital. Further, it was difcult to develop talented and efcient performers because the NTM lacked full-time trainees (participants worked day jobs). Also, the NTM lost some momentum when fnancial support to pay full-time artists was not forthcoming.37

Of Ghosts, Dead Horses, and Elite Ideologues Four scholars—Ben Halm, Asiedu Yirenkyi, Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, and Kof Agovi—have placed the NTM under their respective microscopes. Halm is of the view that the NTM failed. He believes this failure happened when Nkrumah was overthrown from power in a 1966 coup, leading to the disbandment of all the ideological state apparatuses of his regime. Halm sees the NTM as one of such apparatuses. He insists that although debaters on African Theatre went on talking about it into the 1970s they were “fogging a dead horse.”38 He maintains that the NTM had fawed goals arising from a rigid stance that any Western element in African theatre is “ideologically indefensible,” a stance that resulted in an “other-excluding ambience.”39 Halm also fnds the posture of the NTM—its “romantic-racialist neo-African culturalism”—to be fundamentally and intractably problematic. Halm explains the posture variously as an efort to “recuperate a nostalgic-atavistic pre-colonial self-and-world”—a search for an “ulterior precolonial national personality and culture.” In summary, Halm views the “African past” so often invoked in the NTM as irretrievable in full and, as a result, perceives any efort at recuperation as a hopeless enterprise. It is why he deems the ideological rigidity, from his perspective, in the NTM untenable. Yirenkyi also notes an Other-excluding “ambience” (he calls it a “national atmosphere”) in the NTM (as evident in ideologically rigid cultural nationalist slogans to “reject everything European” and reassert “traditional African values”) that was so emotionally packed and polarizing that it was difcult to tell “where political rhetoric ended and … art began.”40 Yirenkyi adds that by placing “propaganda above art”—by sacrifcing “art and creativity for the politics of nationalism”—the NTM’s rhetoric of creating a “relevant theatre” exerted an ideological pressure. This impeded the “free and natural development” of theatre and “exercised the most crippling efects” on some of the theatre artists of the period “who operated under its [the Movement’s] wings.”41 He concludes that the NTM was “a ghost movement from the beginning” because its “social role was never defned,” its “exponents never agreed among themselves” but “followed diferent and un-coordinated directions,” and therefore it survived only in the “dreams and rhetoric of its exponents” by feeding on their cultural nationalist “illusions.”42 Halm is correct that there was no full retrieval to be made of what persisted before of a culture that has been under the siege of colonialism, not least because culture is dynamic and hardly constrained by time or even place. Given

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the forward-looking character of even a historical-legendary drama like Okomfo Anokye, one cannot say that the atavism Halm sees was the goal per se implied in the NTM’s neo-African culturalism. The NTM’s state supported productions of Rogers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, classical music concerts featuring European and American exchange artists, and African adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Euripedes’ Alcestis, hardly present the picture of an “Other-excluding ambience.”43 Indeed, one cannot rule out that some—maybe even most—were exclusive but that is far from saying that Nkrumah’s government envisioned the NTM to be that exclusive. Consider for instance, Nkrumah’s own words about educating the African. In the educational process of the African the best in western culture should be combined with the best in African culture … to prevent the destruction of the best in indigenous African culture and at the same time to acquaint the African with the best in his own as well as in foreign civilizations … Africans imbued with the culture of the west but nevertheless attached to their environment. This new class of Africans should demand the powers of self-determination.44 Clearly, in all the interest that he showed in and the commitment that he put toward the African personality, Nkrumah himself was never that “other exclusive.” The kind of impeding rigidity that Halm and Yirenkyi describe, if it occurred in the NTM, seems rather inconsistent with the vision and goals of its ideological fountainhead, Kwame Nkrumah. In fact, the third critic of the NTM, Botwe-Asamoah, faults the movement for exactly the opposite reason— for not fully separating itself aesthetically (and even institutionally) from its colonial past. The part of Halm and Yirenkyi’s critique that is more persuasive is their assertion that there was an elitist streak in the Movement. Halm charges that NTM proponents were “educated urbanized Ghanaians” and given that “the great majority of Ghanaians, lived in the rural, more ethnic areas,” they were likely to see the NTM as “irrelevant intellectual exercise of alienated … Ghanaians,” and at worst “yet another form of imperialism” spearheaded this time by an indigenous elite whose “African-ness was questionable at best.”45 Yirenkyi agrees that they were an “elite conservative type” who “by their colonial education… acquired conservative tastes,” and so fought their “identity crisis” by calling for “wholesale restoration of things African from their comfortable bungalows.” He suggests that their call was hardly radical because it marked their shift “from one conservative cultural mold into another: from western conservative tastes into African traditional conservative tastes.”46 The fourth critic of the NTM, Kof Agovi, says similarly that “some of the leaders of the Movement … were themselves products of such colonial literary tradition” who showed “a ‘psychic’ ambivalence towards African traditions.”

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The real cost of this elitism to the NTM lay in its marginalization of the practitioners of the itinerant popular theatre called concert party, whose practitioners were largely of the intermediate class.47 This marginalization prevented the Movement from tapping into the energy and audience sensitivities of this performance form. By disseminating representations of Ghanaian life in the village and the city around the country since the 1930s, concert party artists were able to make a popular theatre which converged time and space to foster a national cultural imaginary. By the 1950s, concert party performers had redirected the appeal of what had been a predominantly elite, English-language vaudeville-like variety theatre platform to serve the interests of a much broader and rural-inclusive audience by infusing it with traditional folklore and the immediate everyday concerns of their audiences around the country. For the most part concert party performers had plied their theatre trade outside the direct purview of the colonial state. In fact, the intermediate class to which they belonged, was a key political base for Nkrumah in the fght for independence. Therefore concert party performers were at the forefront of the disafected class sensibilities that brought Nkrumah to power. So, why were they not central in the artistic vision of the NTM? It is not that the NTM had no utility for concert party; after all the Ghana Brigade Drama Group, attached to Sutherland’s Drama Studio, staged plays in the style of the concert party. Indeed, in 1965 Efua Sutherland herself admitted, Concert Party is vintage theatre in Ghana. Its unbroken history of evolution from the 1930s makes it the forerunner of the New Theatre Movement. Its long life, its widespread dissemination, and its popularity give it an advantage that the New Movement [the NTM] must also earn. It is in touch with the country, and the best of its art refects that privilege.48 However, she concluded that “concert party had come to the end of its evolution” and that “what remained of it” were merely “bad examples” that show “little, if any creativity” and are “limited to a lot of bad imitative vaudeville”49 (47–48). In his own outlook on the concert party, Yirenkyi deemed it lacking and felt that “it must be organized and directed to refect the true culture of the people and not only for humor.”50 In the end, Sutherland and Yirenkyi demonstrate a common elite attitude to the popular theatre, praising a form of it but always rendering it sufciently incomplete to need the intervention of more theatrically sophisticated people. Her dismissal of the artistic currency of concert party, which had counted about forty touring companies and boasted more audiences than the NTM, is questionable.51 The 1960s and 1970s were the concert party’s “high period” or “heyday.” With its ffty or so troupes in the country during this vibrant decades, the itinerant form of popular theatre art “represented the most important development in contemporary Ghanaian drama.”52 Concert party, “perhaps the most African of Ghanaian theatre,” had achieved an inventive, multiple-rooted cultural mix of theatrical expressions over more

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decades of experiments.53 It was more than a “forerunner” of the NTM; it was a quintessential modern African theatre. Its practitioners should have been part of the helm, not at the periphery, of strategically formulating details and carrying out the mission of the NTM.

Invoking the African Personality When a military junta ousted Nkrumah from ofce in February 1966 stripping the NTM of its critical state support, the School of Performing Arts and Institute of African Studies, as university institutions, survived his overthrow. Aspects of the NTM remained at the university, likely because key fgures including Sutherland and, later, her students continued to teach there. Some of the students, like Asiedu Yirenkyi, remained skeptical of the NTM. Others, like Mohammed ben Abdallah, believed its mission still had salience. In the 1970s he founded Legon Road Theatre, an “enterprising” attempt to “create a local, indigenous African theatre that is paradoxically both traditional and contemporary, drawing together the extremes of the dual African cultures.”54 Members, “young Africans, heirs to both (European and African) traditions” desired “a theatre that does not deny the possibilities inherent in Western style presentation” yet knew “that if the theatre is to live… it must acquire its own audience among Africans who are not necessarily already fxed in their anticipations by university study.” They adopted the itinerancy of the concert party yet ended up, with their English language plays, catering more to “expatriates and university students” than they would have liked.55 In the “harsh realities” of theatrical life after Nkrumah, they “earned a place in the national theatre movement.” It is worthy of note that as early as 1962, Nkrumah felt that the Arts Council, whose duty was to coordinate the NTM, had fallen short of his “high hopes” for it: it had “failed to make sufcient impact on Ghana society” and “to give people any vision of the rich store of art and music” Ghana possesses.56 Two years after Nkrumah’s fall, the Arts Council was reconstituted as a corporate body by the ruling military junta but by 1969, the Executive Secretary of the Council admitted that some departments were “virtually dead” and many were hardly even aware of their responsibilities.57 The Council’s several attempts to construct community theatre buildings in the regions had been fruitless with the few it managed to put up, in serious states of disrepair. In addition, its fnancial subvention from the government was often not forthcoming, leaving it cash-strapped and short-stafed. On December 31, 1981, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings overthrew elected government of President Hilla Limann. Asiedu Yirenkyi was appointed Minister of Education within Rawlings’s government. He expressed his “disgust” at “the poor performance of the Arts Council.”58 Rawlings had stressed the value of Ghanaians’ “creativity” to fostering national identity and pride.59 Under his auspices, Yirenkyi launched a cultural revival in 1983 themed “Towards a Creative National Culture.”60 This program, like Nkrumah’s NTM, did not clearly articulate a relationship with the concert party, and kept the

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power relationship between the elite and concert party artists tilted in favor of the former. Ben Abdallah was Yirenkyi’s successor in the Ministry of Education and Culture. In 1985, Abdallah secured a Technical Cooperation Agreement with China under which the latter was to assist in the construction of a national theatre building. Recall that the construction of a national theatre building was a key goal of the NTM. A combination of issues, from lack of funding, disagreements about where it should be located, what form it should take (smaller regional/ community theatres around the country, a single major national edifce, or both), or whether it is worth building at all kept it from coming to fruition. Under Rawlings—whose government apparently decided on a single major edifce— construction on the theatre fnally began on June 19, 1990, and was completed two years later in 1992. In perhaps the clearest institutional break with the NTM, Abdallah set up the Ghana National Commission on Culture (GNCC) and persuaded Rawlings to repeal all laws that recognized the Arts Council transferring its “assets, rights, obligations and liabilities” to the GNCC.61 The GNCC was to “initiate policies and programs…for the promotion of national pride, solidarity and consciousness.”62 The government decree that established the Commission charged it to “promote the evolution of an integrated national culture thus creating a distinct Ghanaian personality to be refected in African and world afairs.”63 Evidently, the GNCC could not escape the Nkrumah era: the NTM—even as a “ghost”—haunted the Commission in language and in the completion of the national theatre building (Figure 7.1).

FIGURE 7.1

National Theatre (Ghana).

Source: Commons.

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Rawlings’s speech at the opening of the National Theatre Complex acknowledged “legendary” personalities like Sutherland for “creating a new horizon for the performing arts.”64 This occurred at a time when Ghana was transitioning from military to elected civilian rule; given the enormous political, economic, and symbolic labor of establishing an entirely new political tradition, Rawlings had remade his image to align himself with a resurgently popular Nkrumahist political legacy. He had undertaken “a series of pro-Nkrumah symbolic measures before the elections” to consolidate his “pretension…to the mantle of Nkrumaism.”65 Furthermore, in language mirroring that of the mission of the Arts Council in the 1958 Act, his Decree establishing the Complex tasked it to “foster the development of traditional idioms of contemporary art forms and to preserve the roots, growth and variety of artistic forms that represent modern Ghana.”66 Therefore, his invocation of NTM leaders at the inauguration of the Complex ten days before elections was therefore a brazen and manifestly a political act. To that, he added a touch of the African personality by declaring that “communal work and communal living” are an integral part of Ghanaian culture “marked and reafrmed through the performing arts.”67 Here, as well, we fnd the lingering ghost of the NTM. In Rawlings’s speech to inaugurate the Complex, he commissioned those who would take charge of it to feature performance groups of excellence from marginalized social groups over the country, who “have not been aforded necessary recognition.” He admonished restriction of the use and accessibility of the theatre “to a few lettered artistes and performances,” saying such “pretentiousness” would “perpetuate the blindness of many a literate person to the… artistry and depth” of the country’s largely less literate population.68 Like his invocation of the NTM leaders, we cannot divorce this from his populist politics because, in his military and subsequent civilian regimes (he resigned from the army and ran for and won the 1992 elections), he derived legitimacy by appearing more on the side of the intermediate urban and rural classes than on the highly educated and/or wealthy elite. Still, his charge opened the door for greater engagement between state and concert party. In 1994 the National Theatre collaborated with the Ghana Concert Party Performers Union, to host a revival show series at the Complex, called the Concert Party Show.69 Barely a year after the concert party revival started, Rawlings’s government identifed the National Theatre, which then subsisted on government subvention, as a public organization with the potential for self-sufciency and scheduled it for a systematic withdrawal of state subsidies. This aroused “great alarm and trepidation” from the “artistic community” who feared that the withholding of state funding, which would require partnerships with commercial and corporate interests, would result in the adulteration of culture.70 This view had persisted in the arena of elite Ghanaian arts and culture ever since the state took the purview of establishing the NTM.71 The Theatre called this “an age old prejudice” and tried to pacify it with a new mission that framed its corporate strategy in language identical to the discourse of cultural alienation and communal African personality

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that birthed the NTM. It aimed to become “a proftable” National Theatre “with unique and viable customer-oriented programming in the contemporary and traditional arts” by striking a “reasonable balance” between commercial interests and “the growth of the National Theatre Movement.” 72 The overthrow of Nkrumah may have slowed the momentum of his policies, but it “could not displace his ideology.” 73 Well, at least, not completely. Frequently serving populist or other similar political ends, a counter-colonial sensibility has nevertheless remained as a basis of political legitimacy in Ghana, long after Empire—that is, after the “old” kind of empire with administered colonial outposts. Concomitantly theatre— which Ghanaian leaders of the 1950s tied to the process of emancipation—remains connected with histories of British colonialism, even if just rhetorically. As the broad, pervasive, national-institutional, state-funded body that Nkrumah envisioned it, the NTM is probably well and truly dead. However, as a rallying point of political legitimacy—especially political legitimacy built on a collective sense of cultural authenticity after Empire, the NTM is more than a phantom, it is more than a “dead horse.” It is alive and, I dare say, kicking.

Notes 1 Hollis Ralph Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan Negro Patriot, 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 61–62. 2 Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, 58–60. See also Edward W. Blyden, The African Problem and the Method of its Solution (Washington, D.C.: Gibson, 1890), 22–23, and M. Yu Frenkel, “Edward Blyden and the Concept of the African Personality.” African Afairs 73, no. 292 (1974): 277–289. 3 Edward W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), 38. 4 Edward W. Blyden, African Life and Customs (London: C.M. Phillips, 1908), 8–9. 5 Robert July, The Origins of Modern African Thought: Its Development in West Africa during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), v. 6 Jacob Drachler, Black Homeland, Black Diaspora (Port Washington, NY, Kennikat Press, 1975), 53–54; M. Frenkel, Edward Blyden and African Nationalism (Moscow: Africa Institute, Academy of Sciences, 1978), 109. 7 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 49–50, 74. 8 Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 49. 9 Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 49. 10 Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 193. 11 Nkrumah’s speech at independence. Cited in Daryl Z. Poe, Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-African Agency: An Afro-centric Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2004), 106. 12 Here, I paraphrase Ben E. Halm, who recognized the fetishizing of European cultural imports by using the term “magical-symbolic” for them in Theatre and Ideology (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), 178. 13 Kof Agovi, “The Origins of Literary Theatre in Colonial Ghana.” Research Review 6, no. 1 (1990): 3. See also Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought and Policies: An African Centered Paradigm for the Second Phase of the Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2005), 125. 14 Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought, 125. 15 See Ghana National Assembly, Parliamentary Debates: Ofcial Report (Accra: Ghana National Assembly, 1957), 5. for Minster of Education C.T. Nylander’s response to question #90. See also, Agovi, “The Origins of Literary Theatre,” 3.

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16 Kwabena Nketsia, quoted in Robert July, An African Voice (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 181. 17 Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought, 126. 18 Albert Hammond, “The Moving Drama of the Arts in Ghana.” Sankofa 1, no. 2 &3 (1997): 7. 19 Ghana National Assembly, Parliamentary Debates: Ofcial Report, 5. 20 The Arts Council of Ghana Act, 1958. 21 For the list of the full constitution of the Arts Council Board, see Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought, 126. 22 Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought, 127–128. 23 Efua T. Sutherland, “The Theatre Movement in Ghana,” in The Performing Arts in Africa: Ghanaian Perspectives, eds. Awo M. Asiedu, John E. Collins, Francis Gbormittah, and F. Nii-Yartey, 22–31 (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Sutherland, 2014), 28. 24 Michael Dei-Anan, Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool (Accra: Waterville Publishing House, 1963), 11. 25 Dei-Anan, Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool, 17. 26 Dei-Anan, Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool, 57. 27 Dei-Anan, Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool, 11, 59. 28 For more details about the Drama Studio, see David Donkor, “Making Space for Performance: Theatrical-Architectural Nationalism in Post-independence Ghana.” Theatre History Studies 36 (2017): 29–56, 29 and 38; Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought, 130–137; July, An African Voice, 73–74; and James Gibbs, Nkyin-Nkyin: Essays on the Ghanaian Theatre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), xx. 29 Lloyd Brown, “The African Woman as Writer.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 497. 30 Gibbs, Nkyin-Nkyin, xx. 31 Gibbs, Nkyin-Nkyin, xx. 32 Kwame Nkrumah, African Genius (Accra: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, October 25, 1963), 8. 33 See Efua T. Sutherland, “The Second Phase: A Review of the National Theatre Movement,” in Fontonfrom: Contemporary Ghanaian Literature, Theatre and Film, eds. Kof Anyidoho and James Gibbs, 45–57 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 55. 34 Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought. 35 For detailed studies of the Kodzidan, see David Donkor, Spiders of the Market: Ghanaian Trickster Performance in a Web of Neoliberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 147–177; David Donkor, “Kodzidan Mboguw: Supplanted Acts and Displaced Narratives in the House of Stories,” in The Legacy of Efua Sutherland: Pan-African Activism, eds. Esi Anne V. Adams and Sutherland-Addy, 38–46 (Banbury: Ayebia Clark, 2007), 38–54; Kevin Landis and Suzanne Macaulay, “Trickster’s Double-ness,” in Cultural Performance: Ethnographic Approaches to Performance Studies (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 19–29; Sandy Arkhurst, “Kodzidan,” in The Legacy of Efua Sutherland: Pan African Cultural Activism, eds. Anne V. Adams and Esi Sutherland Addy, 165–174 (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2007), 165–174; Regina Kwakye-Oppong and Elolo Gharbin, “The Atwa Kodzidan.” Africology 10, no. 2 (2017): 165–176; Ofori E. Akyea, “The Atwia Ekumf Kodzidan: An Experimental African Theater.” Okyeame 4, no. 2 (1968): 82–84. 36 Sutherland, “The Second Phase,” 45–54. 37 Sutherland, “The Second Phase,” 48. 38 Halm, Theatre and Ideology, 193. 39 Halm, Theatre and Ideology, 193. 40 Asiedu Yirenkyi, “Kobina Sekyi: Founding Father of the Ghanaian Theatre.” The Legacy 3, no. 2 (1997): 39. 41 Yirenkyi, “Kobina Sekyi,” 46. 42 Yirenkyi, “Kobina Sekyi,” 46. 43 See Sutherland, “The Second Phase,” 55 for a “select” but extensive list of activities associated with the NTM between 1960 and 1965.

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44 Kwame Nkrumah, "Education and Nationalism in Africa.” Educational Outlook XVIII, no. I (1943): 38. 45 Halm, Theatre and Ideology, 195. 46 Yirenkyi, “Kobina Sekyi,” 39–40. 47 For more about this genre of popular theatre, see Catherine Cole, Ghana’s Concert Party (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 48 Sutherland, “The Second Phase,” 47. 49 Sutherland, “The Second Phase,” 47–8. 50 See Ben Ephson, “Ghana’s Cultural Revival.” West Africa ( July 5, 1982): 1758. 51 Scott Kennedy, In Search of African Theatre (New York: Scribner, 1973), 121. 52 Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard, West African Popular Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 14. 53 Kennedy, In Search of African Theatre, 250. 54 Gibbs, “Mohammed ben Abdallah,” 33. 55 Gibbs, “Mohammed ben Abdallah,” 34. 56 Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-cultural Thought, 168. 57 Apronti Jawa and Akyea E. Ofori, “Interview with Arts Council Staf.” Okyeame 4, no. 2 (1969): 104–113. 58 See Ephson, “Ghana’s Cultural Revival,” 1758. 59 Jerry John Rawlings, Preserving Our Environment (Accra: Information Services Department, 1983), 60. 60 Ephson, “Ghana’s Cultural Revival,” 1759. 61 Provisional National Defense Council, Ghana National Commission on Culture Law (Accra: PNDC, 1990), 5 and 7. 62 Provisional National Defense Council, Ghana National Commission on Culture Law, 8. 63 Provisional National Defense Council, Ghana National Commission on Culture Law, 8. 64 Jerry John Rawlings, Enhancing the Cultural Life of Our People (Accra: Information Services Department, 1992), 108. 65 Ebo Hutchful, Ghana’s Adjustment Experience: The Paradox of Reform (Portsmouth: Hienemann, 2002), 213. 66 National Theatre of Ghana, “National Theatre in Retrospect: An Overview of the First Four Operational Years: 1994–1997,” (Accra, 1998), 1. Unpublished. 67 Rawlings, Enhancing the Cultural Life, 108. 68 Rawlings, Enhancing the Cultural Life, 108. 69 For more about the revival, see Donkor, Spiders of the Market. 70 National Theatre of Ghana, “Corporate Plan 1998–2000,” (Accra, 1998), iv. Unpublished. 71 In 1965 Sutherland wrote that “there is no better agency than the Ministry… for carrying the main part of this [fnancing the arts] responsibility in “The Theatre Movement in Ghana,” in The Performing Arts in Africa: Ghanaian Perspectives, eds. Awo M. Asiedu, John E. Collins, Francis Gbormittah, and F. Nii-Yartey, 22–31 (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004), 48. The Cultural Division of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Policy in Ghana (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1975) insists that because of “the size of expenditures involved,” only government can “provide the necessary encouragement, funds and facilities” for “a genuine cultural service” on “a national scale” (9). Culture, it states, is of too great an importance to be left to private enterprise, which might turn it into a commercial venture that provides “rather low forms of entertainment” (41). In 1979 the Ghana’s Minister of Culture told parliament that Ghanaian artists looked forward to a continuation of Nkrumah’s policies and…a culture that “is not adulterated or de-personalized by vulgar commercialism” (A. Arthur, “Sessional Address, 13th December,” in Parliamentary Debates, 286–287 (Accra: Ghana National Assembly, 1979), 287. 72 National Theatre of Ghana, “Corporate Plan,” 5. 73 Jefery Herbst, The Politics of Reform in Ghana (Berleley: University of California Press, 1993), 22.

8 REDISCOVERING TRADITION IN MODERN ASIAN THEATRE Siyuan Liu

Depending on specifc countries, modern Asian spoken theatre generally started in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of global colonialism, usually through contact with Western theatre in colonial or semicolonial port cities and schools.1 Initially in hybrid forms of Western and indigenous dramaturgy and performance that combined speech, song, dance, and scenariobased improvisation,2 these theatres were subsequently rejected by the countries’ modern intellectuals in favor of the speech-only realist theatre deemed highest in theatrical evolution and capable of propagating enlightenment and national salvation. In the age of postwar independence, however, Asian spoken drama artists gradually reevaluated and readopted indigenous performance in their creations, often with spectacular results, as evident in the works of Japan’s Suzuki Tadashi (b. 1939) and China’s Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian (b. 1940). This chapter focuses on the link between coloniality/postcoloniality and modern Asian spoken theatre’s relationship with indigenous performance, with special focus on the impact of Western theatrical realism and anti-realism. Such a focus is meaningful because realism was the dominant form of noncommercial spoken theatre in Asia through the end of World War II despite the infuence of modernism in the early twentieth century that inspired anti-realist plays and productions as well as early attempts to hybridize spoken drama with indigenous theatre. However, such hybridity eforts largely failed to unseat the dominance of realist theatre due to the pressing needs for independence from Western powers and Japan. In the immediate postwar decades, anti-colonial national salvation ceded to domestic politics that often, paradoxically, strengthened the role of realism as a result of ideological divisions during the Cold War. Finally, between the 1960s and 1980s, the combined efect of generational shifts in national politics and Western postwar antirealist theatre—absurdist theatre and the performance

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and training paradigms of Brecht and Grotowski—ultimately inspired the reintegration of spoken theatre and native forms. While this summary is by no means the case for every Asian nation, there is enough of a general pattern to merit an examination of the correlation between coloniality, national politics, and the ideology and aesthetics of theatrical forms, especially between modern spoken theatre and traditional and folk performance.

Social Realist Spoken Theatre as the Core of Modern Asian Theatre For better or worse, realism became tightly bound to theatrical modernity in Asia in the long decades between its disengagement from hybrid commercial theatre and its postcolonial reintegration with traditional and folk theatre. Indeed, its beginning was often linked to frustrations with earlier forms of hybrid commercial theatre that was infuenced by both Western theatre and indigenous performance. In Japan, for example, the director Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), generally considered as the pioneer of the country’s new spoken drama shingeki (new drama), formed the Free Theatre in 1909 and staged Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman because he was fed up with the earlier spoken form shinpa (new school drama) that loosely adapted European plays and borrowed kabuki’s speech and movement patterns, singing, dance, and female impersonation.3 In China, aversion to the supposed impurity and commerciality of the shinpa-inspired form wenmingxi (civilized drama) of the 1910s was so intense that the purely speech form huaju (spoken drama), which started in the following decade, proudly claimed the mantle of “amateur theatre” (aimeiju) to signal its serious intentions to propagate ideas through Ibsen-inspired realism.4 To the intellectuals associated with huaju, wenmingxi belonged to the “legacies” of Chinese theatre, together with traditional and reformed jingju (Beijing opera), that the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s aimed to replace.5 Around the same time, Indonesian intellectuals, who were mostly Chinese journalists, began to criticize the hybrid form of opera melayu (Malay Opera), derived from the earlier hybrid form of komedie stamboel,6 “for not being ‘neat’ enough, and called for performances that were ‘compact and efective.’” 7 The new form, which came to be known as teater moderen (modern theatre), is generally considered as starting in 1926 with the play Bebesari (Sweet Liberty, 1926), which was written in “a refned form of Malay” as “an allegory of the struggle against Dutch colonialism” by recounting “the capture of [princess] Bebesari, who represents purity and nature, by the evil king Rawana and her rescue by her young, idealistic lover.”8 The same dynamic in India resulted, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the split between the speech-only “bookish” plays and the sangeetnatak (“music drama”). One of the frst “bookish” plays was the 1857 Thorle Madhavrao Peshwe (The Elder Madhavrao Peshwa), which “took the colonial theatrical form and used it as a vehicle for anti-colonial sentiment,

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simultaneously valorizing and disrupting its authority,” although a review of a later production of the play found that “many people did not like it because it was made up entirely of dialogues.”9 Thus, this dilemma between spoken drama as a Western import believed to be capable of propagating messages for social change and its lack of popularity among the masses as an intellectual form posed considerable hurdles to its efcacy as a tool for enlightenment. Consequently, throughout the frst half of the twentieth century, challenges to realistic speech-only theatre’s rejection of indigenous performance arose from both aesthetic and ideological perspectives, although they ultimately failed to decenter realism’s predominance in the era with increasing urgency of national salvation. One of the earliest challenges to realist theatre from an aesthetic perspective was China’s National Theatre Movement (guoju yundong) of 1925–1926, only a few years after the start of the huaju movement that aimed for Ibsen-inspired social critical spoken theatre. The movement was started by a group of recently returned, Euro-American educated scholars who were inspired by modernist theatre’s turn to Asian theatre in their attack on realism. One of their leaders Yu Shangyuan (1897–1970) adopted the term xieyi (“writing meaning”) from Chinese painting to describe presentational performance in modernist theatre—specifcally Max Reinhardt’s New York production The Miracle in 1924—in contrast to realist representational performance, which he translated as xiesheng (“drawing from nature,” sketch drawing). After Yu returned to China in 1925 following two years of theatre study in the Carnegie Institute of Technology and New York, he and fellow students from New York Zhao Taimou (1889–1968) and Wen Yiduo (1889–1946) started a theatre department at the Beijing National Academy of Arts. In the summer of 1926, with support from other Western-educated scholars of theatre, literary criticism, fne art and aesthetics, they also started a theatre weekly supplement in Beijing’s best-known newspaper Chenbao (Morning Post) that argued specifcally for the adoption of traditional theatre in spoken drama. By then, Yu had expanded the xieyi concept to mean the non-realist essence of Chinese theatre that formed part of the Asian inspiration for modernist theatre. Advocating that contemporary Western theatre was entreating for Asian help in a “desperate struggle to rid themselves of naturalist shackles,” the group denounced the New Cultural Movement’s introduction of Ibsen in 1918 as “the wrong track for theatre,” arguing “modern theatre in China is an uninvited guest that stealthily snuck into China in the shadow of ideology.”10 However, Yu and his fellow advocates’ call for an Irish-style National Theatre Movement became heresy to the young generation of spoken drama enthusiasts, particularly the students in his own theatre department who, like most of their post–New Cultural Movement peers, frmly believed in realist theatre’s evolutionary advantage over Chinese theatre. Their anger led them to start a theatre supplement at the rival newspaper Shijie ribao (World Morning Post), where they

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ardently attacked Yu and his fellow advocates of the National Theatre Movement as selling out to traditional theatre: After spending tens of thousands of dollars your countrymen earned with blood and sweat to study for many years abroad, you have returned not to do what you should be doing but instead seek comfort and boost the hopeless old theatre.11 Combined with the students’ distrust of Yu and Zhao’s inadequate pedagogy and frustration over their abrupt departure from the theatre department at the end of the summer, such vehement defense of spoken drama’s evolutionary supremacy contributed to the demise of the National Theatre Movement over the course of three months and, together with it, the possibility of early integration of traditional theatre in huaju. Consequently, theoretical recognition of the xieyi aesthetic would not receive wide adoption until the 1980s. Some other spoken theatre practitioners followed modernist practice in the 1920s without engaging in modernism’s adoption of Asian aesthetics. This is especially true of Japan’s Osanai Kaoru who studiously followed Edward Gordon Craig’s production principles in his Tsukiji Little Theatre that started in 1924 and lasted until his premature death in 1928.12 Afterward, the theatre fragmented into two entities with the split group taking a radically left stance. Nonetheless, thanks to Japan’s rising militarism and international proletarian theatre, both companies staged more productions related to social realities, including Maxim Gorky’s Mother, Sergei Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Japanese playwright Ema Shū’s The Opium Wars (Ahen sensō).13 Indeed, as a powerful reminder of the colonial era’s unavoidable shadow on theatre, the 1930s also witnessed Chinese huaju’s turn to the left—from formal experimentations of 1920s—by such leading dramatists as Tian Han (1898–1968), who was forced by his students to make a public “left turn” with a long self-criticism of his neo-romanticist creations of the 1920s. At the same time, this decade toward social realities and impending wars also witnessed the beginning of modern theatre’s experimentations with indigenous performance. In China, Yu and his fellow scholars’ advocacy bore fruit in the outdoor peasant theatres of the northern Ding Xian County between 1932 and 1937 under the direction of Xiong Foxi (1900–1965), who had returned from Columbia in fall 1926 to take over the Beijing National Academy of Arts’ theatre department from Yu and Zhao. In 1932, Xiong, together with his colleagues and students from the recently closed department, went to Ding Xian to head the drama department of a rural literacy campaign. There, they combined modernist aesthetics with traditional and folk performance conventions such as outdoor theatre; processions; mass participations that blurred the fourth wall; songs and dances; symbolic and indigenous design and décor; worship rituals; and

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conventionalized performance. Ultimately, they succeeded in not only carrying out the literacy campaign but making the peasants eager to claim ownership of spoken drama that had otherwise remained an urban elite form. However, Xiong’s Ding Xian experiment was abruptly cut short in 1937 as a result of the Japanese invasion, yet another reminder of the disruptive forces to such experiments in the colonial era.14 As I have argued elsewhere, What was remarkable about the Ding Xian experiment was not only its achievement in combining the indigenous and the Western infuences, but also the fact that it was moving against the prevailing trend of huaju in developing a canonical, didactic, and illusionary theatre aimed toward educated city audiences and using Ibsenian social criticism and Stanislavskian psychological acting.15 By the 1940s, while spoken drama remained largely an urban form for the educated, political entities began to harness the power of traditional and folk theatre in mass mobilization, especially during China’s War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) and India’s Independence Movement that succeeded in 1947, both led by the nation’s communist party. In the Chinese case, the idea of utilizing traditional theatre and folk performance was inspired by a Soviet project to create national musical cultures among its European centers and the Caucasian and Central Asian republics, which was summarized in 1934 by Stalin as “national in form, socialist in content.”16 During China’s own national form debate in 1939–1940, Mao Zedong elaborated the formula to “national in form and newdemocratic in content,” as the foundation of China’s new democratic culture.17 Under this formula and Mao’s further exhortation at the 1942 “Talk at Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,” party artists created two new jingju plays that used historical stories to advocate for the people’s role in history and other pieces using such folk storytelling forms as yangge (rice planting song) and shuoshu (storytelling). Another notable achievement was the opera The White-Haired Girl that used folk tunes to tell the story of a young woman’s struggle against her landlord. As Max Bohnenkamp contends, it was conceived as [a] type of national revolutionary Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total art-work,’ that could maximize the emotional afect and political impact of the work on the basis of a formal integration of elements of Chinese and Western and folk and elite performing arts.18 In India, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) was formed in 1943 as the cultural arm of the Communist Party with a mission to revive the country’s “rich cultural heritage… by re-interpreting, adopting and integrating it with the most signifcant facts of our peoples’ lives and aspirations in the present epoch.”19 The organization went on to utilize such folk forms as jatra in Bengal, tamasha

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and powada in Maharashtra, and Burrakatha in Andhra Pradesh “to spread awareness of India’s subjugation under the English among the largely illiterate rural populations.”20 As Aparna Dharwadker argues, [t]he IPTA’s traditionalism was the frst major modern reaction against two deeply entrenched colonial practices: a century-long denigration of ‘corrupt’ indigenous forms by the colonial and Indian urban elite and the thorough commercialization of urban proscenium theatre by bourgeois Parsi entrepreneurs.21 Similar discussions of the role of indigenous art in national cultures also occurred in other countries, including Indonesia’s Polemik Kebudayaan (Polemics on Culture) debate in the 1930s. It unfolded in the literary magazine Poedjangga Baroe (The New Poet) between 1934 and 1936, with its editor Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana (1908–1994) advocating for Western-oriented rejection of pre-twentiethcentury native elements. Among his detractors was the poet and playwright Sanusi Pane (1905–1968), who argued that rejecting Indonesian values would risk an imbalance between the body and spirit, comparing the West to Faust and the East to Arjuna, the central hero of the Indian epic Mahabharata. By the end of the debate, a consensus emerged that “a new, free, and modern national culture must be based on the national identity and character of ‘the people’ in the broadest sense and at the same time create an appropriate synthesis between Western and Eastern elements.”22 This debate laid the foundation for Indonesian literature and art and would infuence national art policies in the 1950s and 1960s and playwrights such as W.S. Rendra (1935–2009) who sought inspiration from indigenous performance.

Realist Dominance after Independence It should be noted, however, that both the Indian and Chinese utilization of traditional and folk theatre for mass mobilization was not based on their integration of spoken drama, which was largely left out of the equation in this ideological-based vision of traditional and folk theatre that adhered to the view of theatrical evolution with realist spoken theatre over indigenous performance. As Dharwadker points out, IPTA’s formal experimentations in the service of anti-imperial struggle resulted in “a wide range of forms and… varied audiences” while still “[k]eeping a theory of social realism as its central concern which forged an interpretive relationship with the audience.”23 Indeed, this blind faith in social realism by Asian intellectuals in the colonial era and the post-independence decades largely blindsided them to the possibility of integrating traditional and folk theatre with spoken drama. In this sense, the colonial-era mentality of national salvation largely overlapped with modernity in Asia, which, at least in part, explains the staying power of social realism, even during the decades immediately after World War II.

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In addition, the ideological war of modernity between the left and right necessarily needed to run through its course in the postwar years, until seismic political transformations created space for a younger generation of spoken theatre artists to reintegrate indigenous performance. Depending on the country, this generational shift occurred between the 1960s and the 1980s; before then, the fght between the ideological left and right raged on even as the two sides were united in their refusal to integrate indigenous performance. In Indonesia, for example, the ideological divide was between the communists and the universal humanists. During the post-independence teater nasional (national theatre, 1945–1967) period, as modernists, the universal humanists were interested in the ‘new’ and were eager to distinguish their work in the national modern arena from traditional artists, who were considered backward, provincial, and feudal. To a large extent, it was believed and argued that modernization equaled Westernization.24 On the other side of the ideological isle, during President Sukarno’s “guided democracy” (1959–1964), Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, Institute of People’s Culture), the unofcial cultural arm of the Communist Party (PKI), increasingly tightened the enforcement of socialist criticism and mandated social commitment of the artists, suppressing those believing in universal humanism and driving some of them abroad, including Rendra. This political dichotomy was also evident in the modern theatre world in East Asia, particularly in Japan and between communist China and nationalist Taiwan. Along the Taiwan Strait, China followed the Soviet model of socialist realism, with Soviet experts teaching the Stanislavsky System, while the nationalists, who had retreated to Taiwan in 1949, actively promoted anti-communist plays in the 1950s in troupes sponsored by the government and the army.25 In Japan, the modern theatre shingeki had generally been a left-wing afair since the late 1920s and had sufered brutal suppression by the military government during the war while a small faction of the art-for-art’s-sake artists congealed under the era’s foremost playwright Kishida Kunio (1890–1954) and his Bungaku-za (Art Theatre).26 After the war, shingeki experienced ideological vindication and artistic revival, sending delegates to China and the Soviet Union, welcoming the Moscow Art Theatre, and actively participating in the 1960 protest against the renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty (ANPO). On the other side of the ideological spectrum was the author and playwright Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) who wrote an “anti-communist drama” (hankyōgeki) for the Art Theatre and, when the production was postponed, left the company with several others.27 As such, the bond between realist spoken theatre, modernity, and coloniality was relatively tight but not exactly matched temporally, with realism still dominant during the early postcolonial decades. In many countries it would take seismic events to dislodge the centrality of realism and allow the introduction

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of indigenous performance—events such as Japan’s failed anti-ANPO protests (1960), Suharto’s coup in Indonesia (1967), China’s Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976), Taiwan’s end of martial law in the early 1980s, Hong Kong’s 1984 signage of the treaty to return to China in 1997, and Korea’s end of military control in the same decade. Even before those eruptions, though, frustration with realist theatre was already palpable and seeds of incorporating indigenous theatre in spoken theatre were sown in some countries in the 1950s and 1960s, with additional inspiration from postwar anti-realism in the West, especially theatre of the absurd, Brecht, and Grotowski. In India, IPTA, which “[d]uring the ‘golden decade’ of 1942–52… [had] attracted virtually every serious Indian practitioner of theatre, flm, dance, and music,”28 saw its infuence decline by the end of the 1950s. A 1956 drama seminar at the Sangeet Natak Akademi (National Academy of the Performing Arts) advocated for a “clean slate” of Indian theatre by incorporating traditional and folk performance, thus helping the theatre world to emerge from the ideological shadows of colonial modernity and eventually reach the aesthetic amalgamation of spoken drama and folk theatre—known as the Theatre of Roots movement— by the 1970s.29 In China, a national huaju festival in 1956 intended to showcase the fruits of Stanislavsky education by Soviet experts backfred with a largely lethargic performance and incurred sharp criticism from the Soviet bloc experts on the wisdom of eschewing indigenous performance, thus prompting two eforts aimed at huaju localization. Starting from 1956, the huaju director Jiao Juyin (1905–1975) included jingju performance elements in his productions with spectacular results, only to be derailed in the early 1960s with the emergence of ultra-left ideology that led to the Cultural Revolution.30 Then in 1957, national theatre experts were excited to discover, in a Shanghai festival, the hybrid performance of tongsu huaju (popular spoken drama), the descendent of China’s frst, hybrid form of spoken drama wenmingxi that still followed an actor-centered creative system of scenarios and improvisation and borrowed performance conventions from jingju. However, their argument in support of this localized form as a possible alternative to the purely Westernized huaju was summarily rejected by Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962), a wenmingxi veteran and president of the Central Academy of Drama, again on the grounds of the hybrid form’s supposed evolutionary deformities, which he denounced as “the last resort in huaju’s budding era.”31 Together with the impact of the Anti-Rightist Movement that started in the second half of 1957, thus ending year-long liberal art policies that had permitted the tongsu huaju festival in the frst place, the form failed to garner additional national attention. Its remaining troupes subsequently merged into one last company, which was subsumed in 1960 by Shanghai’s municipal huaju company, the People’s Art Theatre. In 1962, amidst another brief period of liberal art policies, the Shanghai huaju director Huang Zuolin (1906–1994), who had directed Mother Courage and Her Children in 1959 as a joint program with East German sponsorship, proposed,

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in a national theatre conference, a theory of three parallel theatrical systems of Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Mei Lanfang. By introducing Brecht, Huang hoped to utilize him as a bridge to dislodge the dominance of social realism in huaju, leading to its integration with traditional performance. He also resurrected the xieyi concept that Yu Shangyuan had proposed in 1925 as a parallel aesthetic system alongside representational realism. With the national political atmosphere soon turning to the ultra-left, however, Huang’s proposal failed to garner any momentum and had to wait until after the Cultural Revolution.

Dislodging of Realist Dominance with Indigenous Theatre In terms of timing, the earliest undertaking of Asian theatre’s systematic rejection of the purely spoken, social realistic theatre was Japan’s Little Theatre Movement, also known as angura (underground), that arose out of the frustration with shingeki’s tight bond with social realism and the failed protest against ANPO. By 1960, according to the director and theatre critic Tsuno Kaitarō, “[s]hingeki no longer maintains the dialectical power to negate and transcend; rather it has become an institution that itself demands to be transcended.”32 As J. Thomas Rimer argues, [i]n breaking out of the kind of imported Western realism so important to modern Japanese theater until the 1960s, playwrights like Betsuyaku, Terayama, and Kara and directors like Suzuki Tadashi began to reclaim some of the deepest layers of traditional Japanese theatrical experience for their own work.33 In 1966, the Waseda Little Theatre opened with Betsuyaku Minoru’s (b. 1937) The Gate, directed by Suzuki Tadashi. It later morphed into the world-renowned Suzuki Company of Toga after Betsuyaku bowed out and Suzuki moved it to the remote mountain region of Toga. In the same year, the Free Theatre was established with the premiere of Satoh Makoto’s (b. 1943) postmodern Ismene. It later evolved into Theater Center 68. The following year saw the opening of Kara Jūrō’s (b. 1940) Situation Theater and Terayama Shūji’s (1935–1983) The Gallery, which premiered the playwright’s The Hunchback of Aomori. In 1969, the Modern Man’s Theater started its frst season with Shimizu Kunio’s (b. 1936) Such a Serious Frivolity, under the direction of Ninagawa Kunio (1935–2016), better known later to the world for his intercultural Shakespearean productions. In his overview of the movement, Takahashi Yasunari (1932–2002) summarizes its achievements in four areas: redefnition of the relationship of the stage to the audience; rethinking of the “hierarchical concept of relations among playwright, director, and actor”; supreme status of the actor’s body; and the return to traditional theatre.34 In one way or another, these tenets can all be viewed as reintegrating with traditional performance, from rejecting the proscenium stage in favor of spaces that allow three-sided or all-around viewing of performance;

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to rejecting the supremacy of the script and speech in favor of traditional and folk performance conventions that included improvisation, singing, and dancing; to the renewed recognition of the centrality of the performer and their body in the creative process. As we will see, these tenets are generally true of similar movements in other Asian nations of this time. In a way, all these changes were made possible through an efort to reconnect with Japan’s theatrical past. As Takahashi points out, “the new apologists construed the aesthetics of the traditional theater, irrespective of their criticism of the existing institutional form of nō and kabuki.”35 Kara, whose stage design usually included a modifed hanamichi, the kabuki runway linking the stage to the back of the house, saw “his troupe as the contemporary manifestation of kawaramono, the so-called riverbed beggars who were the frst kabuki actors. His plays might well be considered kabuki brought up to date.”36 This reconnection with tradition was made abundantly apparent in the plays of the time. For example, Shimizu Kunio’s The Dressing Room (Gakuya), in which four shingeki actresses (including two ghosts) get ready for Chekhov’s The Seagull and reminisce about their career, is modeled after nō dramaturgy with two actresses resembling nō’s protagonist role shite and the other two as the counterpart waki. At the same time, as John Gillespie argues, the play’s “contrast with nō is stark. Instead of crystallizing on the stage an eternal moment, whole and unchanging, Shimizu’s actresses can only string out a chronology of moments, fragmented and fnite, drawn from their stockpile of ‘accumulations.’”37 Even more than technical afnity, for the Little Theatre Movement, a return to tradition also meant a reexamination of Japanese culture. As Goodman points out, there was a sense of urgency derived from the conviction that unless the Japanese could come to terms with the subliminal impulses of their culture, then the souls of the dead would indeed stream back to repossess the living, that unless the Japanese achieved a degree of self-transcendences, ceased in some fundamental way to be Japanese, they would be condemned to repeat ad infnitum the debacle of national destruction they had experience in World War Two.38 In India, the return to indigenous theatre is recognized as the Theatre of Roots movement, which is generally believed as dating from the 1972 production of Girish Karnad’s (1938–2019) Hayavadana (The One with the Horse’s Head) directed by B.V. Karanth (1929–2002). Based on an Indian legend about a woman struggling to choose between two men, the play is inspired by the folk theatrical form of yakshagana of the southwestern state of Karnataka. It starts with a traditional prayer to Ganesha, the god of theatre with an elephant head, sung by the Bhagavata, the traditional stage manager role in yakshagana who starts and oversees a play. He then talks to the audience, introduces the play, and speaks to an actor entering the stage during which they gradually transition into the play proper. The play also adopts other yakshagana conventions such as music, movement, mime, dialogue patterns, and traditional entrance behind a curtain held by two people. In the same year, the play received additional productions by

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fve diferent directors and has been hailed as a landmark when “contemporary theatre began its encounter with tradition.”39 As such, it has become a “poster boy” of the Theatre of Roots movement. Similarly, the Indian dramatist and director Kavalam Narayana Panikkar (1928–2016), who was based in the southwestern state of Kerala known for its rich traditional theatrical forms such as kutiyattam and kathakali and the martial art form kalarippayattu, adopted these forms’ dramaturgical and performance conventions in his plays. One such play, Ottayan (The Lone Tusker), is only sevenand-a-half pages long in English translation but runs ninety minutes in production,40 largely due to extensive physical elaborations and mime, including adopting the kutiyattam dramaturgy nirvahanam in which a character performs his or her previous experience up to the point of the play through speech and exquisite gesticulation with the eyes, hands, and body. The play is about a kutiyattam actor running away from the stage to the forest due to a mistake by his accompanist wife during performance, successfully pretending to be an elephant through miming to protect himself against a charging elephant, being mistaken as an elephant by a passing woodsman and taken to the latter’s leader who orders him to perform a play of building a house, and escaping once the other two are engaged in the performance. This simple plot afords a great deal of physical elaboration and miming, which was possible because Panikkar’s company did not rehearse with a full script. Instead, he only told his actors what he had written for that day and read it out to them so that he and his actors could work out the performance together. In Indonesia, W.S. Rendra’s 1975 The Struggle of the Naga People achieved a similar landmark status as Hayavadana did in India, also through enveloping his play with a native theatrical form, this time the shadow puppet theatre wayang kulit. Just as Karnad’s Bhagavata, Rendra’s play starts with the Dalang, the puppet master who traditionally narrates the whole play while ofering moral commentary. This play contrasts the close-to-earth Naga tribe with the corrupt government (of the fctious kingdom of Astinam from the epic Mahabharata so as to evade censorship) under the infuence of international corporations. In addition to the Dalang, Rendra also adopted other wayang conventions such as using the gamelan and chorus as well as its dramatic structure that starts with the Dalang’s prologue, followed by the sabrangan scenes in the land of the ogres (here the chorus of machines and the ambassadors of super powers), the jejer or “audience scenes” of the major characters (the Naga people and the court of Queen Sri Ratu), and fnally the battle scenes adegan perang, where successive government delegates tasked to seize the Naga land for mining on behalf of a Western Big Boss are defeated by the villagers with the support of international press.41 As Cobina Gillitt argues, by using elements from wayang in an original, contemporary play, Rendra provided a model for freeing Indonesian modern drama from the constraints of its Western-infuenced conventions and placing it frmly in line with the continuing indigenous performing arts traditions. Not only did

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he make a case for reintroducing the gamelan as musical accompaniment, but he also made an attempt to redefne the role of actors as vital members of society with ties to the social wellbeing of their audiences.42 In China, while attempts to bring indigenous theatre to spoken drama started in the late 1950s, political upheavals and the ultimate belief in realistic spoken drama delayed large-scale reintegration until the late 1970s and early 1980s, with an eruption of experimental theatre marked by deep cultural introspection and diverse formal experimentation. The future Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s Absolute Signal ( Juedui xinhao) staged in 1982 in a rehearsal hall of Beijing People’s Art Theatre signaled the start of China’s little theatre movement. Having translated Sartre’s dramatic works, Gao wrote plays such as Bus Stop (Chezhan, 1983) as an allegory of the decade-long waste of life during the Cultural Revolution and The Other Shore (Bi’an, 1986) that prioritized physical movement over textual-based plot and speech. Huang Zuolin, who had used jingju acting and singing as early as 1942—in a hit production titled Qiu Haitang—and proposed the three parallel systems of Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Mei Lanfang in 1962, emerged as the foremost director of theatrical hybridity. His 1987 production of China Dream (Zhongguo meng) used only two actors to perform multiple roles on a largely bare stage using a combination of Chinese and Western acting techniques. In his 1991 production of Alarm Clock (Naozhong), he borrowed jingju’s chou (clown) performance technique from the pre-1949 hit Cleaving Open the Cofn (Da piguan).43 In Taiwan, in contrast to China’s closure to the outside world until the late 1970s, two decades of the little theatre movement inspired by Euro-American avant-garde performance eventually led to a dramatic and performance breakthrough in the 1980 Festival of Experimental Plays, most signifcantly in the play Hezhu’s New Marriage (Hezhu xin pei), a spoken drama adaptation of the farcical jingju play Hezhu’s Marriage, about a maid (Hezhu) marrying her mistress’ fancé in the latter’s disguise and the comical consequences of her action. It was written and directed by Chin Shih-chieh (b. 1951) of Lan-ling Theatre Workshop, where the actors had undergone two years of physical training from Wu Jing-Jyi (b. 1939), a psychologist with experience in the avant-garde productions of New York’s La Mama theatre. Updated as a satire of contemporary Taiwan’s materialism, the production broadly borrowed from jingju aesthetics, including a bare stage and select furniture pieces, physical actions, and symbolic costume and props. The playwright and scholar Ma Sen (b. 1932) ascribes the production’s overwhelming success to ftting thematic match between the original play and contemporary life, successful recreation by assimilating the original’s structure and spirit into the huaju format, and appropriate and astute adoption of certain jingju conventions in performing huaju.44

Conclusion In their discussion of modern European intellectuals’ treatment of traditional and folk literature, Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs identify purifcation

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and hybridization as “two very diferent modernities, produced by two very different ideologies of language.”45 In a way, purifcation was the strategy adopted by speech-only realist theatre in Asia, while hybridization describes the frst and third phases of modern Asian theatre, before and after the purifcation stage. Between the two hybridization phases, the earlier hybrid form emerged during the continent’s colonial modernity as an admixture of the native and the modern/Western before purifcation campaigns—such as China’s New Cultural Movement, known for the slogan “Down with Confucius”—made such popular hybridity a taboo for the pure spoken drama, which was elevated as the only legitimate representative of theatrical modernity in Asia. In one telling instance, in Shanghai in the early 1940s, the remaining artists of China’s wenmingxi were forced to add tongsu (popular) to their form of huaju to signify its “impure” hybridity.46 Since modernity in Asia unfolded under the shadow of global colonialism, regardless of whether a country was ofcially colonized, its modern theatres’ insistence on formal purity largely refected its tight bond with the social missions of national salvation and postwar nation-building, which was not loosened until seismic generational changes in national politics in the 1960–1980s. Only then was the second phase of hybridization possible. In this sense, modern Asian theatre’s rediscovery of traditional performance can be viewed as a postmodern cultural strategy. As Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang contend in reference to China, “the postmodern is also the postrevolutionary and the postsocialist.”47

Notes 1 For more on this topic, see Siyuan Liu, ed., Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre (London: Routledge, 2016), ch. 18. 2 See, among others, Sudipto Chatterjee, The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta (New York: Seagull, 2007); Matthew Isaac Cohen, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 3 Shinko Matsumoto, “Osanai Kaoru’s Version of Romeo and Juliet, 1904,” in Performing Shakespeare in Japan, eds. Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers, and John Gillies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54–66; Siyuan Liu, “Adaptation as Appropriation: Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China.” Theatre Journal 59, no. 3 (2007): 411–429. 4 Chen Dabei, Aimei de xiju [Amateur Theatre] (Shanghai: Shanghai shiji chuban jituan, 2011). 5 Hong Shen, “Daoyan” [Introduction], in Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, ed. Hong Shen, vol. 9 (Drama) (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu gongsi, 1935), 15. For the work with such amateur groups by the huaju pioneers Tian Han and Hong Shen in Shanghai, see Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), ch. 2; Siyuan Liu, “Hong Shen and Adaptation in Modern Chinese Theater.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, no. 2 (2015): 106–171. For the infuence of A Doll’s House on the emergence of amateur huaju in the 1920s, see Chengzhou He, “‘Before All Else I’m a Human Being’: Ibsen and the Rise of Modern Chinese Drama in the 1920s.” Neohelicon 46, no. 1 (2019): 1–15.

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6 For more on komedie stamboel, see Cohen, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903. 7 Cobina Ruth Gillitt, “Challenging Conventions and Crossing Boundaries: A New Tradition of Indonesian Theatre from 1968–1978” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2001), 57. 8 Gillitt, “Challenging Conventions and Crossing Boundaries: A New Tradition of Indonesian Theatre from 1968–1978,” 63. For more on “the frst Indonesian play,” see Evan Darwin Winet, Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre: Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20–32. 9 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Siyuan Liu, and Erin B. Mee, Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000 (New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014), 173. The second quote is from a contemporary play review. 10 From articles by Zhao Taimou and Wen Yiduo, quoted in Siyuan Liu, “The Cross Currents of Modern Theatre and China’s National Theatre Movement of 1926.” Asian Theatre Journal 33, no. 1 (2016): 19–20. 11 By Zuo Ming, quoted in Liu, “The Cross Currents of Modern Theatre and China’s National Theatre Movement of 1926,” 22. 12 Reiko Oya, “Kaoru Osanai and The Impact of Edward Gordon Craig’s Theatrical Ideals on Japan’s Shingeki (New Theatre) Movement.” Shakespeare 9, no. 4 (2013): 418–427. 13 Jonah Salz, ed., A History of Japanese Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 502–508. 14 For more on the Ding Xian experiment, see Siyuan Liu, “‘A Mixed-Blooded Child, Neither Western Nor Eastern’: Sinicization of Western-Style Theatre in Rural China in the 1930s.” Asian Theatre Journal 25, no. 2 (2008): 272–297. 15 Liu, “‘A Mixed-Blooded Child, Neither Western Nor Eastern’: Sinicization of Western-Style Theatre in Rural China in the 1930s,” 295. 16 Marina Frolova-Walker, “‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (1998): 331, 334. 17 Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965). 18 Max Lowell Bohnenkamp, “Turning Ghosts into People: The White-Haired Girl, Revolutionary Folklorism and the Politics of Aesthetics in Modern China” (PhD dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2014), vii. 19 Quoted in Erin B. Mee, Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage (New York: Seagull Books, 2008), 71. 20 Mee, Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage, 72; Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 312–313. 21 Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947, 312. 22 Gillitt, “Challenging Conventions and Crossing Boundaries: A New Tradition of Indonesian Theatre from 1968–1978,” 69. 23 Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947, 30. The second quote is from Nandi Bhatia, “Staging a Change: Modern Indian Drama and the Colonial Encounter” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas-Austin, 1996), 219. 24 Gillitt, “Challenging Conventions and Crossing Boundaries: A New Tradition of Indonesian Theatre from 1968–1978,” 81. 25 Ma Sen, Xichao xia de Zhongguo xiandai xiju [Modern Chinese Drama Under Western Waves] (Taipei: Shulin, 1994), 207–219. 26 Brian Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity (London: Japan Library, 2002), 96–113; J. Thomas Rimer, Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

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27 Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity, 165–173. 28 Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947, 26. 29 Suresh Awasthi and Richard Schechner, “‘Theatre of Roots’: Encounter with Tradition.” TDR 33, no. 4 (1989): 48–69; Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947, 28–36. 30 Siyuan Liu, “Towards a Chinese School of Performance and Directing: Jiao Juyin,” in Stanislavsky in the World: The System and Its Transformations Across Continents, eds. Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina (London: Methuen, 2017), 149–165. 31 Siyuan Liu, “‘Spoken Drama (Huaju) with a Strong Chinese Flavor’: The Resurrection and Demise of Popular Spoken Drama (Tongsu Huaju) in Shanghai in the 1950s and Early 1960s.” Theatre Research International 42, no. 3 (2017): 276. 32 Kaitarō Tsuno, “The Tradition of Modern Theatre in Japan,” trans. David Goodman. The Canadian Theatre Review, no. Fall (1978): 11. 33 Robert T. Rolf and John Gillespie, eds., Alternative Japanese Drama (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992), xi. 34 Rolf and Gillespie, Alternative Japanese Drama, 1–9. 35 Rolf and Gillespie, Alternative Japanese Drama, 5. 36 Rolf and Gillespie, Alternative Japanese Drama, 252. 37 Rolf and Gillespie, Alternative Japanese Drama, 122. 38 David G. Goodman, Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1988), 23. 39 Awasthi and Schechner, ““Theatre of Roots”: Encounter with Tradition,”49. 40 Kavalam Narayana Panikkar, “The Lone Tusker,” trans. K.S. Narayana Pillai. Journal of South Asian Literature 15, no. 2 (1980): 247–254. 41 W.S. Rendra, The Struggle of the Naga Tribe: A Play, trans. Max Lane (St. Lucia: University of Queenlands Press, 1978); Gillitt, “Challenging Conventions and Crossing Boundaries: A New Tradition of Indonesian Theatre from 1968–1978,” 176–183. 42 Gillitt, “Challenging Conventions and Crossing Boundaries: A New Tradition of Indonesian Theatre from 1968–1978,” 183. 43 For more on Cleaving Open the Cofn and its pre-1949 sensation, see Siyuan Liu, “'Ruined by Several Actresses Who Added Pornographic Elements’: The Popularity of Emerging Actresses in Chinese Jingju (Beijing Opera) and the Censorship of Two Plays,” in Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Arya Madhavan (London: Routledge, 2017), 97–109. 44 Ma, Xichao xia de Zhongguo xiandai xiju, 275. 45 Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and The Politics of Inequality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 195. 46 Liu, “‘Spoken Drama (Huaju) with a Strong Chinese Flavor’: The Resurrection and Demise of Popular Spoken Drama (Tongsu Huaju) in Shanghai in the 1950s and Early 1960s,” 267–268. 47 Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, Postmodernism & China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 4. Dirlik and Zhang also refute the objection to using postmodernism in third-world countries on temporal (not a late capitalist society) and spatial (uneven societal development) grounds: We would like to suggest, to the contrary, that it is precisely such a situation of spatial fracturing and temporal desynchronization that justifes the use of the postmodern against the spatial (as in the nation-form) and temporal (as in the development of a national market and culture) teleologies of modernity. The coexistence of the precapitalist, the capitalist, and the postsocialist economic, political, and social forms represents a signifcant departure from the assumptions of a Chinese modernity, embodied above all in the socialist revolutionary project. (3)

9 THE EMPIRE LINGERS Staging Zainichi Korean Lived Experiences in Contemporary Japan Jessica Nakamura

For the nearly sixty-fve million visitors to Osaka’s Expo ’70, Japan had arrived. The exhibition, taking place over six months and involving seventy-seven countries, asserted Japan’s position as a major global power fewer than three decades after the devastation of the Asia-Pacifc War (1931–1945). Despite the apparent international quality of the Expo, this celebration faced inward—nearly all of the attendees were Japanese. And from the displays of the Japan Pavilion, the largest of the Expo, a visitor would hardly know that, before 1945, Japan had had an empire spanning from the middle of the Pacifc Ocean into Manchuria, from Russia to Indonesia, only dissolving with the country’s defeat. The Japan Pavilion, instead of acknowledging this history, displayed a narrative of economic progress that moved from the country’s modernization in the early twentieth century to its postwar success.1 Skipping over the war and empire, the pavilion refected the ways in which the postwar period’s emphasis on domestic rebuilding went hand in hand with eliding the nation’s imperial past. Expo ’70 also revealed that the empire could not be easily dismissed: although the Japan Pavilion attempted to omit empire, the event itself implicitly recalled colonial exhibitions before 1945, designed to display imperial acquisitions.2 When the 2008 play Yakiniku Dragon uses Expo ’70 as a backdrop, it takes up the contradictions and real-life efects of the empire’s obscured yet continued presence from the postwar (1945–1989) into the contemporary period (1989– present). Instead of celebrating the nation’s economic achievements, Yakiniku Dragon activates Expo ’70 to expose the empire’s persistence and present a drastically diferent image of postwar progress. Taking place in the Expo’s home city of Osaka in the year leading up to and during the event, the play portrays a year in the life of an ethnically Korean Kim family, known as Zainichi (“residents in Japan”). While Zainichi can refer to any long-term Korean immigrant in Japan, it alludes to what Yoshiko Nozaki, Horimitsu Inokuchi, and Kim Tae-Young

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describe as “a legacy of colonialism.”3 The frst wave of Zainichi arrived in Japan as colonial subjects in the 1920s and 1930s.4 After the war, Zainichi were stripped of their Japanese citizenship, legally erased from the nation. Today, as the term Zainichi indicates, they are still treated as foreign despite the fact that some Zainichi families have lived in Japan for multiple generations. Written and directed by third-generation Zainichi playwright Chong Wishing, Yakiniku Dragon received rave reviews when it premiered at the state-subsidized New National Theater in Tokyo in 2008, and was remounted in 2011 and again in 2016. Yakiniku Dragon’s portrayal of Expo ’70 refects its representational strategy: it focuses on the Kim family’s lived experiences to illustrate the empire’s continued infuences and undermine Expo ’70’s postwar narrative of national progress. While the city of Osaka is preoccupied with preparations for Expo ’70, in Yakiniku Dragon, the event itself never appears onstage. Outside of a brief mention of the event in casual conversation, the closest Yakiniku Dragon comes to portraying Expo ’70 happens in its penultimate act, when the two eldest Kim daughters return from the exposition with souvenirs and complaints about its crowds. By casting Expo ’70 to the side, Yakiniku Dragon turns our attention to the home as site in which empire remains and suggests that portraying the home can be a means to confront Japan’s colonial history. With Expo ’70 in the background, the six acts of Yakiniku Dragon unfold from spring of 1969 to spring of 1971. The play is set in Kim family patriarch Ryūkichi’s Yakiniku Dragon restaurant, which also doubles as the family residence. The Kims are a blended family: Ryūkichi has two daughters, Shizuka and Rika, from his frst marriage; his second wife, Eijun, has a daughter, Mika, from a previous marriage; and his son Tokio is the only child Ryūkichi and Eijun share. Over the course of the play, Shizuka, Rika, and Mika fnd romantic partners. Tokio is frequently the object of bullying at his Japanese high school, and he eventually commits suicide to avoid remaining in his school. Throughout the play, District N, the Zainichi Korean settlement where the Kims reside, is at risk for removal for city development. At the end of the play, the settlement is leveled and all residents are evicted. The Kims leave their home and disperse to locations in Osaka, South Korea, and North Korea. This chapter explores intersections between persisting imperial infuences and the ways in which the theatre exposes imperial power dynamics in domestic, quotidian life after Japan’s empire ofcially ended. The connection between the domestic and empire has been established by scholars who characterize the domestic space as that which iterates empire. Ann McClintock’s foundational Imperial Leather describes the domestic realm as “a social relation to power,” involving “processes of social metamorphosis and political subjection.”5 As I have explored elsewhere, in Hirata Oriza’s contemporary Japanese play series Seoul Shimin (1989–present), set in the residence of a Japanese colonial settler family living in Seoul during Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula (1910–1945), everyday activities extend imperial power from the military and colonial bureaucracy into the home.6

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If domestic space furthers empire, what happens after empire is ofcially over? Unlike the narrative presented in Expo ’70’s Japan Pavilion, in Yakiniku Dragon the empire is not confned to the past. Rather the empire lingers; it has moved from overt control to difused subjugation in the home and its surrounding neighborhood infrastructure. My analysis of Yakiniku Dragon identifes the play’s domestic setting as a mode of theatrical address and intervention in the face of Japan’s enduring empire. The home becomes a site that temporally bridges empire, postwar, and contemporary periods. By staging the poor living conditions of Zainichi, the play challenges the postwar logic in Japan, one that claims the war and empire as an aberration, a detour on the way to economic prosperity. Not only does Yakiniku Dragon expose the empire’s persisting traces, but also its theatrical production makes them visceral for audience members, building connections between contemporary audiences and Zainichi characters.

Zainichi in Yakiniku Dragon When it premiered in Tokyo in 2008, Yakiniku Dragon engaged three historical moments in twentieth- and twenty-frst-century Japan: the prewar and wartime colonial period when the frst wave of Zainichi arrived in Japan, the postwar period when the play was set, and the contemporary period when it was performed. While Japan experienced a number of changes, from war to postwar rebuilding and economic success to prolonged recession, the end of the war fxed Zainichi in time. After Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, Korean colonial subjects initially moved to Japan for education and employment opportunities. Starting from 1939, Koreans were brought as forced laborers to work in Japanese mines and factories, and some were later drafted into military service during the Asia-Pacifc War.7 After the war, the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty ended the US Occupation in Japan and divested Zainichi of their Japanese citizenship. As John Lie explains, this change was not only sudden but also transformed Zainichi into a people without a nation: they “became Koreans [Chosenjin] when there was no Korea, only two warring states claiming the mantle of Korea.”8 Since 1952, Zainichi have been simultaneously connected to the imperial past and unable to move into the future because of their legal status as noncitizens. The play’s backstory refects the real-life hardships of Zainichi Koreans in Japan, including playwright Chong’s own experiences of discrimination.9 Patriarch Ryūkichi was among the frst wave of Zainichi who moved to Japan for work. Later, drafted into the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacifc War, he loses an arm in battle. After the war, Ryūkichi, his frst wife and two daughters, Shizuka and Rika, have every intention of returning to Korea, but circumstances, including family illness, a massacre in Ryūkichi’s home village on Cheju Island, and the Korean War, keep them in Japan. After Ryūkichi’s frst wife dies, he meets his second wife, Eijun, who came to Japan after 1945 with her daughter, Mika.

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As the postwar economy progressed, the Zainichi became doubly elided, obfuscated from public discourses. As Lie explains, the myth of Japan as a mono-­ ethnic nation and its erasure of Zainichi flourished, going unchallenged in the period of Japan’s greatest economic growth from the 1960s to 1980s.10 From the 1980s, conditions for Zainichi started to improve: they became eligible for state benefits, including public housing and the national pension plan.11 Changes to Japan’s immigration and naturalization policies in the 1980s and 1990s made it easier for Zainichi to become Japanese citizens. The path to citizenship is still “cumbersome and uncomfortable for some,” and others are reluctant to naturalize because doing so would sever them from their Korean roots.12 In the twenty-­ first century, K-pop and Korean television programs have become immensely popular in Japan, bringing Korean culture to the Japanese mainstream.13 The popularity of Korean culture and easier path to citizenship for Zainichi, however, has not prevented discrimination and anti-Korean violence. Xenophobia persists in rising instances of anti-Zainichi hate speech, what Tomomi Yamaguchi describes as part of the “new right-wing, national chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic movement that emerged in Japan in the mid-2000s.”14

Zainichi, Unhomely and Abjection The home takes on social and political significances during the imperial, postwar, and contemporary times of Yakiniku Dragon. Jordan Sand explains that links between the home and the state were established in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) as part of Japan’s “modernization efforts;” the household “was made into an essential instrument of the modern state.”15 This image of the home developed at the same time that Japan expanded its empire. In Japan’s newly annexed Korean Peninsula, the state realized its assimilation policy, dōka (“to make the same”) in Korean daily lives—Koreans were forced to speak Japanese and take Japanese names. As Mark Caprio traces, print culture in the Korean colony politicized everyday behaviors when newspapers commented on perceived backwardness of Korean living conditions.16 In the postwar period, when Japan transitioned from a former empire and wartorn country into a global economic power, affirmations of national prosperity were not limited to public events such as Expo ’70. Rather, the home became a goal of economic success, a place to showcase the accumulation of financial gain, what Anne Allison describes as “at once a consumer dream and social contract.”17 In the mid-1950s, the common expression, “three sacred treasures,” a washing machine, refrigerator, and a black-and-white television, articulated the home’s role in images of postwar prosperity. The “three sacred treasures” reiterated earlier connections between the domestic and the development of Japan’s national identity; according to Yoshimi Shunya, the phrase’s reference to the original three sacred treasures (sword, jewels, and mirror), “national symbols for authenticating the position of the emperor,” reflected the postwar “fad”

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“of talking about the economy in terms of images of Japanese mythological antiquity.”18 Marilyn Ivy explains how consumption afected the home: electric appliances “became the objects of desire, the signs of middle class inclusion;” “their presence and placement within Japanese dwellings […] also homogenized Japanese domestic space.”19 In the contemporary period, the swift economic decline beginning in the 1990s, followed by over a decade of economic stagnation and recession, did not transform the image of the home as much as make the postwar home seem out of reach for many. Allison explains that the prevalent complaint of “feeling homeless” in contemporary Japan not only refects the rise of homelessness but also the “existential or social sense of home and homelessness,” a “breakdown of everyday security, the loss of whereabouts (ibasho), and the ‘refugeeization’ of groundedness itself.”20 In the contemporary period’s economic precarity, the home was not repurposed but rather the postwar home of accumulation and consumption remained a now unattainable ideal.

The Zainichi (un)Home and Postwar Progress Yakiniku Dragon’s portrayal of the Kim residence reveals how economic progress was unavailable to Zainichi even during times of prosperity. In the play the Zainichi home links the empire to the postwar and contemporary periods. The play’s temporal evocations can be understood through Homi Bhabha’s concept of “unhomely,” in which the “intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions.”21 For Bhabha the “unhomely moment” in postcolonial literature “relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence.”22 Yakiniku Dragon takes up unhomeliness on the stage, where the Kim family home manifests the temporal suspension of Zainichi as noncitizens. Considered in relationship to the narrative of postwar prosperity, the Zainichi home marks the ways in which the empire remains, undoing the narrative of postwar progress that claims the war and empire as deviations on the way to Japan’s economic success. The Kims’ neighborhood, a Zainichi settlement called District N, is a holdover from the wartime period. A note at the top of the published script explains the history of District N—during the Asia-Pacifc War, Korean laborers who built the military airfeld lived there, and with no place to go after the end of the war, they stayed.23 The neighborhood also refects the uneasy status of Zainichi in postwar Japan: as Sonia Ryang explains, after 1952, Zainichi, now noncitizens, “remained in the ghetto” and outside of state concerns; as foreigners, they had no access to government benefts or welfare, so “their poverty did not constitute a domestic class problem for the Japanese national state.”24 The location of the airfeld, within the city yet on its very fringes, recalls Karen Shimakawa’s concept of abjection, in which Asian Americans defne Americanness through their continual exclusion from national identity. Applied to Zainichi in Japan, District N’s separation from Osaka implies that Zainichi defne postwar progress

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through their inability to participate in it—in the words of Shimakawa, they “continually must be both made present and jettisoned.”25 The infrastructure of District N refects the ways in which Zainichi daily lives are fxed in the colonial past. District N has not been updated since it was frst built during the war. Early stage directions describe the poor conditions of the neighborhood. While electricity was recently installed, there are no telephone lines. Built on a former riverbed, the neighborhood lacks a sewage system, so as Yakiniku Dragon restaurant–regular Abe Yoshiki comments, every time it rains, the neighborhood foods and “poop rises to the surface.”26 District N suggests that the Kims cannot experience postwar prosperity because the very infrastructure that supports their life is not the same as elsewhere in Japan. A  prewar temporality defnes the Kims’ home when they need to take extra steps, for instance, to discard waste water. The frst lines of the play foreground this lack of infrastructure. The youngest Kim child, Tokio, who serves as a narrator throughout, introduces the audience to the neighborhood. He begins with the neighborhood’s close proximity to the airfeld and the poor construction of its buildings: every time a plane passes by, “the houses shake, and the cherry blossom petals fall.”27 The Kim home does not refect that of the postwar middle class. Missing from the Kim residence are some of the contemporary sacred treasures (updated from the 1960s): a cooler (air-conditioner), car, color television. According to postwar consumerist logic, by 1970 the Kims are at least ffteen years behind. Despite the popularity of single-family homes in postwar Japan, Ryūkichi and Eijun’s grown daughters live with them, reminiscent of multigenerational households of the past.28 Doubling as the Kim family business, the place barely resembles a home. In the play productions, the set primarily shows the restaurant—the front of the Kim house—and not the Kim living space in the back. The 2018 flm version highlights the efects of the family business on the Kims’ personal life when it transitions quickly between the home space and restaurant to illustrate that there is no separation between these two areas and thus no privacy for the Kim family members. The Kim home’s combination of living and work space evokes another imperial attribute of the Zainichis—their status as laborers. When Zainichi lost their Japanese citizenship after the war, Yakiniku Dragon suggests that “laborer” was one of the few available identities for Zainichi. Because Zainichi furthered Japan’s imperial project through their manual labor, the jobs available to characters in the play—in mining, construction, and factories—return the Zainichi to an imperial-era Japan. Yakiniku Dragon further reveals the Zainichi status as laborer to be ironic, and the Kim home indexes the consequences of the multigenerational defnition of Koreans as “laborers” divested of national identity. Ryūkichi’s daughters are employed, but the young male characters in the play are constantly out of work; they lose their jobs for careless mistakes, or in the case of Rika’s husband, Tetsuo, for attempting to organize Korean laborers. Zainichi unstable employment recalls conditions in the 1920s and 1930s, when, as

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historian Ken Kawashima describes, Koreans faced discrimination “not only in terms of the kinds of jobs that were available […] but also in the pervasive discriminatory practices of employers, who would habitually suddenly fre or refuse to hire Korean workers.”29 Yakiniku Dragon shows the negative emotional efects when men can neither attain this prewar identity nor evade it. These are played out in the Kim’s combined home and business space when Tetsuo, frustrated at his lack of employment options, spends his time in the Yakiniku Dragon establishment during the day, eating BBQ, playing games, and drinking with other unemployed regulars. The infrastructure of District N and residents’ employment status undermine the positive image of postwar economic prosperity. By showing the anachronistic living conditions of the Zainichi, the play, in the words of theatre journalist Kōno Takashi, portrays “hardships and pain experienced by Zainichi” to counter any contemporary feelings of nostalgia for this time of economic success.30 Focused on Zainichi, Yakiniku Dragon reminds us that postwar prosperity was not available to all. The play’s references to Zainichi labor further calls attention to those negatively afected by postwar progress—Zainichi contributed to the economic success of the postwar period, including constructing the airfeld, but those in District N did not reap its benefts. Along with undercutting nostalgia for postwar progress, Yakiniku Dragon’s unhomely residence also casts forward to the economic downturn of contemporary Japan. Tetsuo’s situation references the difculty in fnding work for Japanese youth after the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s. In parallel to the lack of employment options for contemporary youth, Tetsuo complains that the only work available to him is construction or mining.31 The characters’ economic struggles point to the demise of postwar prosperity and the undoing of its forward-moving progress. In so doing, Yakiniku Dragon revises postwar historiography. Instead of the narrative of postwar progress, one that, refected in Expo ’70’s Japan Pavilion, skips over the war and empire, Yakiniku Dragon downplays the postwar period. In the logic of the play, postwar prosperity becomes the aberration in a twentieth-century Japan that connects war and empire to the contemporary economic stagnation. Yakiniku Dragon suggests that Zainichi identity hampers upward mobility when the play follows the inability for Ryūkichi and Eijun to realize their dream that their son, Tokio, move up in Japanese society. Ryūkichi and Eijun are fnancially stable enough to send Tokio to a Japanese school. Like other Zainichi of his generation, Tokio was born in Japan and primarily speaks Japanese. At his high school, however, Tokio is forever marked as Korean and is mercilessly bullied. He frequently skips class, and when the school informs Ryūkichi and Eijun that he must repeat his current grade, he commits suicide. After he dies in the play, the character continues to provide narration—a reminder of lost future promise. Despite Ryūkichi and Eijun’s money, their son’s Zainichi status prevents him from fully entering successful Japanese society. The lack of hope in Tokio’s story mirrors the pessimism of the contemporary period, when, as David Leheny

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describes, there is a growing “lack of confdence in the future—a stark departure from Japan’s previous postwar generations.”32 But in Yakiniku Dragon, it is Zainichi identity that impedes any bright future, a sentiment that returns at the end of the play when the Kims lose their home.

Audience Connections The economic struggles of the Kim family may be one commonality they share with the present-day audience. In Yakiniku Dragon, the staged home further establishes connections between spectators and Zainichi characters. The home creates moments of embodied experiences that work to build closeness between these two seemingly disparate groups of people. These staged visceral and emotional connections illustrate the potential of the home in forging understanding and revealing moments of resistance in the quotidian. Yakiniku Dragon uses its home setting to share sensory experiences with its audience. The premiere production established one such connection when characters cooked actual meat onstage. In yakiniku restaurants, patrons grill their own food, so regulars at the Yakiniku Dragon establishment did the same. The type of food reinforced Zainichi diference: instead of choice cuts of meat available at typical yakiniku restaurants, Ryūkichi’s establishment serves “hormone yakiniku,” organ meat BBQ for poor people, embraced by Zainichi in Japan. In the premiere production in the New National Theater, the only state-sponsored theatre in Japan dedicated to contemporary theatre, audiences entered to characters cooking meat.33 Chong Wishing described this staging as articulating “his irreverence toward governmental institutions” when the audience was “assaulted by the greasy pungent clouds wafting from the braziers on stage.”34 The smells did not start the play and then dissipate; rather, characters repeated this “assault” again by cooking meat in Act 5. Beyond confrontational “assault,” there is another important outcome of grabbing the audience attention with live cooking: the enjoyment of yakiniku by characters in the play can prompt audience curiosity and even hunger. Bridging stage and auditorium with aromas, the play also builds auditory connections with its audience. Throughout the play, we hear planes take of and land, an efect of the neighboring airfeld. Written into the script, plane activity creates shared experiences with the residents of District N. Airplane noise demonstrates the ways that frequent air travel disrupts the Kims’ daily life; the plane noise doubly interrupts daily conversation and play dialogue. When Tetsuo reveals that the new airport runway, built in preparation for Expo ’70, is too close to District N by 30 meters, Yakiniku Dragon directly relates postwar progress to airport activity, with each noisy take-of or landing indicating the negative efects of postwar rebuilding on Zainichi life.35 The noise of the airfeld also emphasizes Zainichi status as non-Japanese citizens; in 1969 Ryūkichi and his daughters were only able to hold South Korean passports a few years earlier. Refective of the importance of shared visceral experiences in Yakiniku Dragon,

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the 2018 flm version recreated this staging element: plane interruptions were overwhelmingly loud, their reverberations felt in the plush movie-theatre seats. Along with shared sensory experiences, Yakiniku Dragon invites its audience into the intimate moments of the Kim family life as they celebrate milestones and experience hardships, including Shizuka’s engagement and Tokio’s suicide. The play also stages a number of everyday moments, including cleaning, eating, singing with patrons, and Ryūkichi enjoying freworks during the summer from outside his door. These quiet moments show how the family make do with their harsh living conditions. Over the course of the play, the neighborhood transforms in audience understanding from a bleak place without a proper sewer system to one in which the Kim family experiences joy. Tokio’s remarks further this transformation. In his opening monologue, he asserts that he “hated” his neighborhood, but in the fnal moments of the play, he claims that he “loved” the neighborhood and the people in it.36 The play’s use of the home space to build connections between audiences and Zainichi characters contrasts Expo ’70’s spectacle of postwar progress. By not staging Expo ’70 directly, Yakiniku Dragon makes it inconsequential to the lives of the Kims. The play further minimizes the Expo when Shizuka brings home a Tower of the Sun fgurine—the representative image of Expo ’70 by artist Okamoto Tarō—the 70-meter-tall statue reproduced in miniature. If Expo ’70, in the words of Sandra Wilson, “contributed to the expansion” of national networks and “the further integration of people all over Japan into national life,” the lack of interest in the Expo by the Kim family indicates their felt separation from the national community, unable to celebrate national success because they cannot participate in it.37 Instead of recreating national spectacle, Yakiniku Dragon’s shared sensory and afective experiences work to build a diferent community in the theatre space between Zainichi characters and contemporary audiences. While Zainichi in Japan have constantly been made other, stripped of national citizenship in the postwar period, and in Ryang’s words, “not deemed human,” Yakiniku Dragon’s home relates us to their humanity.38 Yakiniku Dragon suggests that while legal defnitions may rob Zainichi of political subjecthood, the very act of living can be considered an act of resistance. Yakiniku Dragon displays the ways in which Zainichi, despite the eforts of the state to legally erase their existence, live their lives. Central is Ryūkichi’s positive outlook. At the end of Act 1, Ryūkichi climbs up to the rooftop where Tokio spends most of his time. Admiring the way in which the fallen petals of the cherry blossoms turn the tenement roofs pink, he asserts to Tokio, on a “day like today, you have to believe in tomorrow.”39 At the end of Act 5, he manages to experience joy in the midst of hardship. After a city ofcial informs the family that the neighborhood will be demolished, Ryūkichi and Eijun admire the freworks; Eijun, still grieving over Tokio’s death, suggests to Ryūkichi that they “make a son”; Mika sings, and the entire family dances.40 Despite impending loss, Yakiniku Dragon reveals the Kim family’s response as one of persistence, situated in acts of living and enjoying their surroundings.

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The Loss of the Home These small moments of joy, however, do little to prevent state action against the Kim family. In the fnal act of the play, the city has begun demolishing District N, and the family moves out of their home. If postwar progress is realized, in part, through the accumulation of household goods, the play ends with the Kims dispossessed of their home. The fnal act opens with half of the Yakiniku Dragon restaurant destroyed. The family, scattering to live in apartments elsewhere, leaves many of their belongings behind to accommodate for their new lives. Ryūkichi and Eijun have a cart flled with baggage for their new residence in Osaka, presumably smaller than their home in District N, while Testuo and Shizuka carry a trunk with them to move to North Korea. Moreover, the play depicts the loss of the neighborhood as another negative efect of postwar economic growth. When the family prepares to leave in the fnal act, Tetsuo discloses that the city has demolished District N to create a park. Yakiniku Dragon suggests that erasing traces of Zainichi existence is key to urban growth in the postwar period.41 The city treats the neighborhood as a stain to be removed to maintain the narrative of postwar progress and move forward into the future, an efort that went hand in hand with Expo ’70.42 Because the play stages the neighborhood as a place to be loved (where joyful homes exist), Yakiniku Dragon pits audience “love” of District N against postwar civic clean-up eforts. The ability for the city to strip the Kim family of their home makes clear the absence of citizenship rights for Zainichi. The loss of home illustrates what Athena Athanasiou describes as the “regulatory practices” of dispossession, in which “the logic of dispossession is interminably mapped onto our bodies […] through normative matrices but also through situated practices of raciality, gender, sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiness, economy, and citizenship.”43 In Yakiniku Dragon, the dispossession of the Kim family home shows that property ownership is a privilege of citizenship, unavailable for Zainichi noncitizens. Ryūkichi is unable to own property that he paid for: while Ryūkichi insists that he bought his property immediately after the war from a soy sauce maker, it turns out that he was defrauded. Zainichi were rarely permitted to own property, but, more importantly, District N properties were prohibited from sale because they are on city land. Beyond the domicile, Ryūkichi’s very body has been dispossessed: Yakiniku Dragon connects his missing arm to the loss of the home: when the city representative visits the Kim residence in Act 5 and informs Ryūkichi of the certainty of eviction, he yells about his sacrifce to the Japanese nation: he was forced to fght in the war, and then demands “if you are going to take my land, give me my arm back.”44 This moment also refects the lack of recourse for Zainichi, based in difculty in communicating with city representatives—Ryūkichi expresses his heightened emotions in his frst language of Korean, with the Osaka city ofcial’s only response being “I don’t understand you” before quickly leaving. The destruction of the neighborhood undoes any possibility for postwar success for the Kims. Evicted from District N, the family’s future is uncertain:

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Ryūkichi insists that he will not reopen his yakiniku business, and without this business it is unclear what he will do for a living. The play implies that it is not money that leads to prosperity, but the unattainable entrance in Japanese society through citizenship. While the Kims may have enough income to send Tokio to a Japanese school, their economic success is not enduring—it does not lead to a better life. The destruction of the home afects the stability of the Kim family; in the fnal moments of the play, they disperse. Mika and her new husband, Hasegawa, move into their own apartment in Osaka. Rika and Shizuka leave Japan for a homeland they never knew: Rika for South Korea and Shizuka for North Korea. Shizuka’s future is doubly cast in doubt—we know that many Zainichi who repatriated to North Korea in the 1970s were sent directly to labor camps.45 Steeped in uncertainty, the ending imagines a diferent postwar existence for the Zainichi characters. Instead of upward mobility and the accumulation of household comforts, Yakiniku Dragon contemplates what else is out there, asserting that economic progress is only one of many existences during the postwar. The Zainichi postwar experience is ambivalent, apparent in the fnal moments of the play. Eijun and Ryūkichi are the last two characters to leave their neighborhood. While they seem hopeful about the future, this hope is also cast in doubt: Ryūkichi repeats what he previously told Tokio at the end of Act 1: “on a day like today, you have to believe in tomorrow.”46 The repetition of these lines undermines his seemingly optimistic statement, turning it into an inefcient mantra that did not help Tokio earlier in the play and does not accurately refect their situation as the two leave for a new home without their children. Instead of hope, Yakiniku Dragon’s ending relates Zainichi dispossession and uncertainty to its audience. After Yakiniku Dragon works to build connections between audience and characters and after showing the home as a place in which the Kim family thrives, the play shares the devastating loss of the Kim home with its audience. Considering the loss of the home as a parallel experience to that of smelling yakiniku aromas or being disrupted by airport noise, the play makes palpable Zainichi precarity during the postwar and contemporary periods. In another gesture toward collapsing imperial past, postwar, and present, Yakiniku Dragon mirrors the lost sense of home and security in the contemporary period. If the contemporary period treats the home as a postwar ideal, unattainable to many, then the Kim family and audience follow parallel tracks. At the end of the play, as the Kims disperse so too do the audience members into a Japan that is flled with more uncertainty than not. The ending reinforces that postwar progress does not result in stability in the contemporary period. The felt instability, palpable for theatre productions staged in 2008, 2011, 2016, and again for the 2018 flm reminds us that any economic success cannot erase the imperial past. Yakiniku Dragon’s portrayal of the Zainichi home illustrates the ways in which there is no “after empire” in Japan. Not only does the empire haunt the present in Zainichi lived experiences, but also these lived experiences are not dissimilar from ones felt today.

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Conclusion: New Uncertain Futures This chapter has explored the role of the domestic in connecting Japan’s imperial past with its prosperous postwar and unstable present. Yakiniku Dragon’s representation of the Kim family’s harsh living conditions exposes the traces of the Japanese empire and shares visceral and afective experiences with contemporary audiences, bringing the empire into the contemporary period. Connections between audience and Zainichi, as I have explored, take place in the shared space of the theatre. When Chong adapted Yakiniku Dragon for the screen in 2018, the play continued its work in another format. As a flm, Yakiniku Dragon stayed mostly true to the original production. Focused on the home, there were few scenes set away from the Kim residence. Yet the flm also evoked another major event that signaled the country’s hope for a brighter future—the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Excitement for Expo ’70 parallels the ongoing anticipation for the Olympics, where the entire nation seems to be looking forward, hopeful that the now rescheduled 2021 events will revitalize Japan’s stagnant economy.47 In parallel to the original 2008 theatrical production of the play, however, the flm version of Yakiniku Dragon reconsiders such promise. When viewing District N on the big screen, I was sent back to the postwar and colonial periods to wonder how much the empire lingers almost seventy-fve years after its dissolution. Encouraging me to experience Zainichi daily life, the flm adaptation implicitly reevaluated the real costs of and motivations behind the drive to the Olympics. After the flm, I exited the theatre into a hot Tokyo summer afternoon, the ever-present Olympics excitement now jarring. I wondered: what kind of national community will the 2021 Olympics create? Where will the Zainichi be? And who will be displaced and erased by the event? Yakiniku Dragon considers alternative modes of being besides postwar prosperity and economic rebuilding, all defned by fnancial promise and consumerism. The flm, like the play, calls our attention to an existence separate from the economic success of the past and so desired again in the future, forging commonality and understanding not through the accumulation of goods but rather by living for a while in the Kim home.

Notes 1 Yoshikuni Igarashi describes the Japan Pavilion’s display: it “leapt from the Meiji Period to the present without bothering to account for what lay between,” Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 165. 2 Peter Eckersall explains, the theme of ethnographic display and a somewhat artifcial presentation of a cultural moment trapped in time, embodied in the trope of cultural tradition, as was featured in the expos of one hundred years ago, was still on display at Expo ’70. Performativity and the Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 113.

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3 Yoshiko Nozaki, Horimitsu Inokuchi, and Kim Tae-young, “Legal Categories, Demographic Change and Japan’s Korean Residence in the Long Twentieth Century.” The Asia-Pacifc Journal 4, no. 9 (September 4, 2006). 4 Although the term “Zainichi” can reiterate the attitude that long-term Korean residents in Japan are still “foreign,” I use it because Chong considers himself a “Zainichi Korean” and is interested in writing about “Zainichi” experiences (Noda Manabu, “Through the Eyes of the Other: The Many Faces of Japan’s Chong Wishing/Jung Eishin/Chong Wishin.” Critical Stages 5 (December 2011).) 5 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge, 1994), 34. 35. Italics in original. 6 See my article “Refecting on the Unknowns of History: Theatrical Ghosting, Transgenerational Remembrance, and Japanese Imperialism in the Seoul Shimin Play Series.” Modern Drama 61, no. 2 (2018): 149–170. 7 As John Lie describes, both the law and public discourse of the pre-1945 Japanese empire “decreed ethnic Koreans as Japanese nationals and the Emperor’s children,” Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), x. According to Youngmi Lim, “conscripted labor migration to Japan and the war front” after 1939 remains one of the “most contentious war-related memorial matters,” “Introduction: Two Faces of the Hate Korean Campaign in Japan.” The Asia-Pacifc Journal 15, no. 5 (December 15, 2017). Zainichi are not only in a legal limbo, but as Lim describes, they “continue to be placed in a historical limbo, being permanently excluded from the orthodox narratives of Japan’s ‘national’ history.” 8 Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), x. 9 Chong was born in 1957 in Japan. Many of his characters in the play refect Chong’s own personal history. His father immigrated to Japan before the war and fought in the Japanese Army (Philip Flavin, “Chong Wishing’s Yakiniku Dragon 焼肉ドラゴン: A Portrait of the Zainichi Korean-Japanese Experience.” Asian Theatre Journal 31, no. 1 (2014): 22–24). 10 Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 24. As Lie notes, Zainichi “would emerge on the national television over a half-century later” in television dramas (15). 11 Nozaki, Inokuchi, and Kim, “Legal Categories.” 12 Nozaki, Inokuchi, and Kim, “Legal Categories.” 13 Flavin mentions the popularity of Korean culture in Japan and cultural exchange between Japan and South Korea as contributing to Chong’s popularity in Korea, “Chong Wishing’s Yakiniku Dragon,” 22. In the 2000s there were still over half a million Zainichi in Japan, fgure from Sonia Ryang, “Introduction: Between the Nations: Diaspora and Koreans in Japan,” in Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, eds. Sonia Ryang and John Lie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3. But as Nozaki, Inokuchi, and Kim explain, these fgures are hard to track because those who become Japanese citizens are no longer counted as foreign residents (“Legal Categories”). 14 Tomomi Yamaguchi, “Xenophobia in Action: Ultranationalism, Hate Speech, and the Internet in Japan.” Radical History Review 117 (2013): 98. 15 Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5. 16 Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 90–91. 17 Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 22. 18 Yoshimi Shunya, “‘Made in Japan’: The Cultural Politics of ‘Home Electrifcation’ in Postwar Japan.” Media, Culture & Society 21, no. 2 (1999): 155–156. 19 Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 249. 20 Allison, Precarious Japan, 78. Allison explains that despite “what was such an ‘ordinary lifestyle’ (hitonami no seikatsu) has now become a privilege of a diminishing minority,”

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

the home “still signifes belonging and place” and refects “the longing for aspirational normativity” (33). Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141. Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” 144. The stage directions at the top of the play explain this history (Chong Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” in Chon Wishin gikyokushū: tatoeba no ni saku hana no yōni, Yakiniku Doragon, Pāmaya Sumire, ed. Katō Motoi (Tokyo: Ritoru Moa, 2013), 169–170. Sonia Ryang, “The Denationalized Have No Class: The Banishment of Japan’s Korean Minority—A Polemic,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12, no. 1 (2012): 164. Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 3. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 203. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 173. Andrew Gordon describes another change to the postwar confguration of the home: single-member households increased and extended family households decreased between 1955 and 1970, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 256. Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 3. Kōno Takashi, “Engeki jikyō” (“Theater Commentary”). Higeki Kigeki 61, no. 8 (2008), 62. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 220. Allison covers the contemporary economic downturn and its efects on employment for youth in her second chapter in Precarious Japan. David Leheny, Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 18. In the 2009 Higeki Kigeki review, Kōno mentions that actors were cooking from thirty minutes before the show started, to create the atmosphere (62). Flavin, “Chong Wishing’s Yakiniku Dragon 焼肉ドラゴ,” 20. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 256–257. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 173, 325. Sandra Wilson, “Exhibiting a New Japan: The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and Expo ’70 in Osaka.” Historical Research 85, no. 227 (2012): 160. Ryang, “The Denationalized Have No Class,” 160. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 201. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 311. See, for example, Igarashi Yoshikuni’s discussion of the clean-up campaigns in Tokyo in the years leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (Bodies of Memory, 146–153). As Eckersall asserts, Expo ’70 “tried to reimagine the city as a place without confict” (Performativity and the Event in 1960s Japan, 112). Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political: Conversations with Athena Athanasiou (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 18. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 310. See Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s “Freedom and Homecoming” for a discussion of the complex histories of repatriates to North Korea. She explains that the increasing rigidity of North Korean society in the Cold War resulted in a large “but uncertain number” “sent to labor camps,” in Diaspora without Homeland, eds. Sonia Ryang and John Lie, 39–61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 60. Wishing, “Yakiniku Dragon,” 327. More so, the 2021 Tokyo Olympics evokes the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that, in the words of Igarashi, “symbolized the full acceptance of Japan back into the international community and marked Japan’s future path” (Bodies of Memory, 143).

10 TOWARD A THIRD PERFORMANCE Dance, Exile, and Anti-Imperialism in Fernando Solanas’s Tangos: El exilio de Gardel Victoria Fortuna

In one of the fnal scenes of Argentine director Fernando Solanas’s 1985 antiauthoritarian flm Tangos: El exilio de Gardel (Tangos: The Exile of Gardel), one of the flm’s protagonists, Gerardo, shares yerba mate with Carlos Gardel and General José de San Martín. This ghostly encounter with the iconic early twentiethcentury tango singer and the nineteenth-century independence hero takes place at night in a cavernous, fog-flled Paris train station. While the shared experience of exile in France unites the men, the context of Gerardo’s exile is the main subject of the flm. Tangos follows a group of political exiles living in Paris during Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Marked by the torture, disappearance, and murder of an estimated 30,000 citizens (known as desaparecidos), the military government targeted anyone broadly linked to leftist activity and tightly scripted proper modes of citizen comportment, policing everyday life in public as well as private space.1 Motivated by direct threats from the government as well as fear of repression, thousands of people (including Solanas) lived abroad during this period.2 As the characters pass the yerba mate and refect on their exiles in a space defned by bodies in transit, San Martín asks Gardel to sing. He declines and instead plays a record on a gramophone. Gardel selects Volver (Return), his famous ode to the transnational subject who yearns to return home to Buenos Aires and refects mournfully on time’s efect on the body and memory. This haunting scene exemplifes how Solanas’s flm positions the efects of dictatorship and exile in relationship to legacies of empire spanning from the independence era to the global Cold War. The last military dictatorship, like other brutal dictatorships that spread throughout Latin America in the 1970s, aimed to curb the rise of communism and received support from global powers including the United States and United Kingdom.3 The anachronistic presence of San Martín in the scene questions whether an Argentina torn apart by political violence is indeed after empire. San Martín died in France in 1850, having

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left South America during the earlier struggle for independence. His presence in the scene positions the fght for independence from imperial infuences as yet unfnished. At the same time, Gardel’s presence in the scene highlights how the flm identifes performance repertoires—specifcally the tango—as sites of antiimperial resistance. Though identifed as Argentine (Gardel grew up in Buenos Aires), there were controversies over whether he was born in France or Uruguay (historians have concluded that he was born in Toulouse, France). As a popular entertainer he traversed national borders throughout his career with long stays in Paris. The simultaneous cultural nationalism and statelessness that Gardel embodies refects the exiles’ own transitory state as well as their search for cultural identity. The main action of the flm follows the struggle of the political exiles to stage a performance called a tanguedia.4 A name that combines the words tango, tragedia (tragedy), and comedia (comedy), this fctional genre blends dance, music, and theatre rooted in rioplatense (Argentine and Uruguayan) traditions to express the exiles’ experiences. To understand how the flm integrates representations of exile with antiimperial politics, this chapter focuses on the prominent role of dance in the tanguedia as well as in the broader narrative development of the flm. In addition to tango music and dance, the tanguedia also features a number of contemporary dance sequences. These scenes are performed by the well-known Argentine contemporary dance company Nucleodanza; choreographers Susana Tambutti and Margarita Bali co-directed the group between 1974 and the mid-1990s. This chapter demonstrates how the flm’s integration of tango and contemporary movement genres functions on two related levels. Both choreographic repertoires work to capture the fractured experiences of violence and exile. At the same time, the incorporation of both genres aims to realize a mode of performance (the tanguedia) that expresses a specifcally rioplatense worldview and resists both the cultural alienation endemic to exile as well as legacies of cultural imperialism in Latin America. In writings and published interviews, Solanas defnes cultural imperialism as the national and international mandate that Global South cultural production engage with both popular and high art aesthetic values aligned with the Global North, a topic explicitly thematized throughout Tangos.5 This chapter develops how the histories of both tango and contemporary dance and their reception in the moment of the flm’s release expose nuances as well as tensions in the flm’s anti-imperial politics. The flm’s appeal to the cultural specifcity of tango rubs up against the dance’s often-discussed role in the global marketing of racialized and hypersexualized Latin American dancing bodies, or what Marta Savigliano has termed “the political economy of passion.”6 A French-Argentine co-production, Tangos was screened at prestigious international festivals including the Venice Film Festival and received signifcant critical acclaim. The flm’s successful distribution and reception, particularly in Europe, likely benefted from tango’s status as a “hot” international commodity. Additionally, though defnitions of “contemporary dance” vary widely, the genre typically signals some relationship to the Western concert tradition (e.g., classical

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ballet, modern, and postmodern dance), complicating the flm’s appeal to Argentine performance traditions and identity.7 Ultimately, I contend that the inclusion of contemporary dance in the tanguedia in fact accurately represents this genre as part of Argentine dance history and decenters its historical and ongoing attachment to the United States and Europe at the same time that the flm’s invocations of tango illustrate the form’s own nuanced history of national resistance and global exotifcation. A close reading of the flm’s movement politics nuances the rich body of scholarship on Solanas’s oeuvre broadly and Tangos specifcally. Scholars have explored in depth how the non-narrative structure of Tangos and its representational devices work to express the psychic, corporeal, and political aspects of exile.8 As evidenced in the ghostly scene in the Paris train station, the flm crosses time and place, and blurs the line between reality and fction. Throughout the flm, struggles to negotiate the aesthetic and production challenges of the tanguedia bleed into, and become confused with, the personal lives of the flm’s protagonists. Fragments of characters’ lives are revealed to the viewer through exchanges of people, letters, and telephone calls between Buenos Aires and Paris; fashbacks to lives left behind; and human rights organization meetings. Mannequins (often naked, broken, and dismembered) lurk among the tanguedia performers as they rehearse and appear regularly within the exiles’ everyday lives.9 As Romina Miorelli notes, the mannequins contain multiple meanings: they index the absent presence of desaparecidos, visualize the corporeal displacement of the exiles themselves, and register the physical toll of attempting to maintain a sense of

FIGURE 10.1

Exilio de Gardel: Tangos (1985).

Source: Tercine, Cinesur.

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cultural identity in exile.10 Furthermore, at critical points in the tanguedia rehearsal process, characters’ physical bodies quite literally rupture, with breaks in the skin revealing insides made of broken mechanical springs and gears.11 While the emphasis on fractured bodies bears particular weight in light of the political context of Tangos, in 1989 Solanas referred more broadly to his flms as “pictorial bodies” (cuerpos pictóricos), pointing to a marked corporeal sensibility in his flmmaking.12 Writing on the flm, however, largely has not attended to the role of dance in constructing Tangos’ “pictorial body” or to the ways in which the diferent performance genres at work contribute to its nuanced imagination of rioplatense cultural identity.

Toward a Third Performance Solanas’s turn to performance in Tangos as a site of cultural reclamation and political resistance formed part of a broader shift away from the political documentary work that marked the early portion of his career, when he frst articulated his political mission as a flmmaker. In 1969, Solanas and fellow flmmaker Octavio Getino published the well-known essay, “Toward a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Liberation Cinema in the Third World.” For the authors, Third Cinema names minoritarian flmmaking committed to social change whose content and flmic devices interrupt aesthetic, intellectual, and economic dependencies on the Global North.13 They defne Third Cinema in opposition to First Cinema, or the Hollywood production model that promotes escapism and capitalist values, and Second Cinema, or European art cinema focused on self-expression.14 Solanas and Getino’s manifesto grew out of their work with the Liberation Film Group, a movement that developed in conversation with the leftist militant movements that gained force in Argentina in the late 1960s. Solanas’s 1968 La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces)—his frst feature-length flm—sounded a call to revolutionary action as it explored Argentine political history in three parts over the course of over four hours. While Solanas’s earlier work equated the didactic representation of political histories with politically efcacious cinema, later works embraced fctional narratives, cultural mythologies, and performance practices as part of a new wave of Third Cinema.15 In addition to its central role in Tangos, Solanas’s Sur (South, 1988) also takes up tango as part of its exploration of the life of a former political prisoner living in Buenos Aires following the return to democracy. While this move toward artistic expression prompted some critics to accuse Solanas of moving toward the Second Cinema he once rejected, in an interview with performance artist Coco Fusco he stated that his turn to performance themes and practices in Tangos was also a challenge to critics who dismissed his earlier work as agitprop lacking “artistic creativity.”16 The flm’s multiple “esthetic levels,” which combine song, storytelling, dance, and music, both provide a fexible structure that allow Solanas to tell a complex story and invite spectators to experience the flm as a “synthesis of the arts.”17

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This turn to performance also aimed to extend Third Cinema’s search for cinematic modes proper to the Global South that are not dependent on “closed models and genres” from the United States and Europe.18 In an interview featured in the flm’s publicity dossier, Solanas articulated his vision for the tanguedia as a kind of “third” performance: One day I asked myself, “why can’t I invent a synthesis-word that captures what I think if every day the North sends us turns, terms, and phrases that aren’t ours?” The tanguedia is my personal vision of this history of love and melancholy…it is the sum-synthesis of a tango, plus a tragedy, plus a comedy. Some French critics have spoken of a Brechtian aesthetic: I would say that it is best to let the great Brecht rest and talk about something else. This something else is, in fact, the tanguedia, a genre with great predominance from musical performance as well as the sainete rioplatense.19 The sainete is an early twentieth-century popular theatrical genre that used stock characters to express social critique in Argentina and Uruguay. As Solanas notes in the same interview, the mixing of tragedy and comedy captured in the term tanguedia also invokes the related early twentieth-century grotesco criollo (creole grotesque) theatre tradition.20 While sainetes often invoked humor through stock characters, grotesco criollo plays relied on tragicomedy to efect social critique.21 The genre is closely associated with the work of Argentine playwright Armando Discépolo who frequently collaborated with his brother, Enrique Santos Discépolo, a well-known tango lyricist. The grotesco criollo reemerged during the last military dictatorship as a way of engaging the incomprehensible violence of this period.22 By locating the tanguedia within a genealogy of popular Argentine music, dance, and theatre, Solanas makes a claim for the tanguedia’s cultural specifcity as both uniquely suited to express the exile’s experience and as a way of rejecting northern cultural imperialism. The tanguedia, as Solanas formulates it here, constitutes a Third Performance, a hybrid “something else” that rejects the imposition of both European cultural references (like Brecht) as well as commercialized Argentine, and more broadly Latin American, culture. An early episode in the flm explicitly thematizes the tanguedia’s attempt to circumvent the demand that Latin American cultural production both market diference and adhere to Global North aesthetic frameworks. Viewers frst experience the tanguedia when Florence, a French actress, comes to a rehearsal and agrees to help fnd a production space and secure fnancing for the project. Pierre, a French tanguedia collaborator and human rights ally closely connected to the Argentine exile community in Paris, has invited her. Upon her introduction to the cast, she iterates a series of stereotypes around Argentine and Latin American culture. Florence jokingly suggests that she expected Gardel himself as the tanguedia’s creator, comments on what she perceives as the female lead’s hypersexuality, and confuses Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez for an Argentine author. At a later full-length showing of the work, she exclaims

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that the tanguedia is “magnifcent” but difcult to understand. Other spectators join her in asserting that the performance is “too Argentine.”23 Florence and the other spectators represent a northern gaze that both purports to “know” Latin America through its cultural production while also imposing its own aesthetic preferences and demands for translatability. Their reaction to the tanguedia highlights both its cultural specifcity and the politics of European cultural imperialism that render it illegible in Paris. Interpreted as a form of Third Performance, the tanguedia extends the political commitments of Solanas’s cinematic repertoire through a hybridized genre that prioritizes Argentine popular performance traditions, particularly tango. This move, however, ultimately invokes the complex past and present of this music and movement form, which has both national histories embedded in resistance as well as its own privileged place in Global North audiences’ desire for the exotic other. Furthermore, the prominence of contemporary dance in the telling of the exiles’ stories simultaneously supports and complicates Solanas’s conception of the tanguedia as a synthesis of Argentine performance history aimed at working against cultural imperialism.

On Tango(s) Tangos opens (and closes) with a wide-angle shot of a couple dancing at a distance on a Paris bridge. Geneva Grand Theatre Ballet dancer Robert Thomas choreographed the duet and performed it with fellow company member Manon Hotte. As the couple moves across the bridge, they execute choreography that foreshadows the hybridity of the tanguedia itself. Their movement oscillates between tango-infected partner work reminiscent of socially danced tango and movements more closely associated with theatrical tango and the virtuosic concert dance vocabularies that inform it. Socially danced tango is typically improvisational, and the leader generally prompts the steps of the follower through subtle physical cues. Theatrical tango performances, on the other hand, are conceived specifcally for the concert stage—often for tourists or presentation abroad—and feature set choreographic sequences. In the flm’s opening, glimpses of the socially danced tango are visible in moments of close embrace (inclined torsos pressed together), a tight kinesphere (minimal extension of limbs beyond base of support), and small, detailed footwork. The choreography, however, also includes virtuosic vocabularies associated with theatrical tango, including soaring lifts, deep back arches, arabesques, high leg extensions, and a vertical spine.24 The camera soon cuts to lovers Mariana and Juan Dos ( Juan Two), the musician co-writing and composing the tanguedia. Juan Uno ( Juan One), Juan Dos’s co-author, has remained in Buenos Aires; a running narrative throughout the flm is that the tanguedia cannot be completed until Juan Uno sends the ending. The search for endings—both for the tanguedia and for the exiles’ time in Paris—is an ongoing theme throughout the flm. Mariana, the tanguedia’s lead actress, has spent the past eight years living in exile with her now twenty-year-old

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daughter, María. Mariana’s husband and María’s father, a lawyer, is a desaparecido. María, like her mother, works to represent her experience of exile through performance throughout the flm. She forms part of a group of young people creating a street performance that parallels the creation of the tanguedia.25 As they come into view, Mariana and Juan Dos echo the distant couple on the bridge as they perform a more sensual tango that trades virtuosic fourishes for the intimacy of the close embrace. Their dance travels along the banks of the Seine and ends with suggested sex on a bench beneath a bridge. Mariana, dressed in a loose white shirt, deeply slit black skirt, fshnet tights, and black heels, summons the image of the tanguera (female tango dancer) femme fatale. Juan Dos is dressed in a long dark overcoat and fedora hat reminiscent of Gardel’s favored dress.26 The pairs of couples dancing on and underneath bridges—structures symbolic of physical and emotional journeys—establish tango as a modality for expressing and representing the experience of exile in the flm. These opening scenes also manifest the complex history of the dance itself. A form of music and dance with diverse African and European components, tango frst developed in Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.27 Impoverished immigrants and migrants from rural regions were among the frst to dance tango, which was initially practiced in the most marginal spaces in Buenos Aires. Tango emerged in the midst of intense modernization projects that, beginning in the post-independence period, worked to modernize Buenos Aires and attract immigrants and agricultural labor to rural areas. Nation-building texts like President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism on the Argentine Plains (1845) advocated for the migration of northern Europeans, populations that he considered desirable. Millions of immigrants indeed arrived during this period; however, the majority were southern European (largely Italian), poor, male, and concentrated in the urban capital. The upper classes racialized the new immigrant population and constructed them as “sexual inverts,” in part for their association with early tango culture.28 In these early years, tango formed part of a national panic related to immigration, race, class, and gender as its steps and song lyrics captured experiences of exclusion, displacement, and loss.29 For anthropologist Julie Taylor, early tango culture “protested modernization and the projects of capitalism” as it ofered opportunities to express experiences of violence and exclusion.30 The dancing bodies in these opening scenes recall this history as they move through a diferent context marked by loss and estrangement. Their invocation of tango as a way to express the experience of exile refected broader uses of the form to process the violence of the last military dictatorship in dance halls and on concert dance stages throughout the late dictatorship and post-dictatorship period.31 As Taylor writes in her auto-ethnographic account of dancing tango in Buenos Aires during and after the last military dictatorship, “the tango has become a way to explore other experiences of exclusion deeply felt as part of Argentine realities. It is marked by absence, by rupture, by violence – it bears these spores.”32 Solanas’s flm in fact inspired the title of her book, Paper Tangos,

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and frames from the flm feature in the upper corners of each page to create a fipbook—a literal tango on paper. The frames animate the milonga loca (crazy milonga) from the tanguedia. The flm’s opening tangos along the banks of the Seine, then, both summon tango’s early history of resistance to Eurocentric modernization projects and inscribe a new era of struggle into the form, illustrating tango’s role in crafting a Third Performance that aims to articulate a rioplatense worldview and reject the dominance of Global North forms of expression. At the same time, however, the theatrical virtuosity of the distant couple dancing on the bridge (the Geneva Grand Theatre Ballet dancers) as well as Mariana and Juan Dos’s evocative dress (which summons well-worn stereotypes of Argentine culture) also echo the tango’s own international travels—and value—in a global cultural economy that fetishizes diference.33 In other words, Tangos firts with movement vernaculars at once deeply embedded in expressing marginal experiences and thick with entanglements in the “political economy of passion.”34 Circulating frst through the upper-class salons of Paris and London in the early twentieth century and then across the globe, tango became not only a symbol of Argentine national identity but also a key referent in the global exotifcation and hyper-sexualization of Latin American dancing bodies. Tangos’ premiere came on the heels of renewed national and international interest in the form in the 1980s, fomented by the premieres of Broadway-style theatrical productions, such as Tango Argentino, that premiered in Paris in 1983.35 Even as it worked toward anti-imperial forms of performance and cinema, Tangos undoubtedly courted—and likely benefted from—the European desire for the “hot” Latin American other.36 By positioning the tanguedia as a Third Performance aware of its own entanglements in uneven circuits of exchange, the flm opens up a variety of interpretative possibilities that both challenge and ascribe to stereotypical imaginations of tango and Argentine culture. Echoing its name, the flm indeed invokes a breadth of tangos as opposed to a singular, “authentic” one. These multiplicities arise not only through the alignment of tango with exile in a way that recalls its historical depth but also in the flm’s inclusion of contemporary genres within the tanguedia’s hybrid structure. While Solanas’s own formulation of the tanguedia privileges forms comfortably identifed as “Argentine” (tango, sainete, grotesco criollo), the inclusion of Nucleodanza’s contemporary choreography to express traumatic experiences of political violence and exile refuses conceptions of Argentine dance as limited to tango and ofers an expanded imagination of cultural identity and resistance.

Choreographing Violence By the time the company began work on the flm, Nucleodanza was well established on the Buenos Aires contemporary dance scene. Susana Tambutti and Margarita Bali, along with Ana Deutsch, formed the company in 1974 and developed their early work during the peak of state terror.37 Nucleodanza emerged

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three decades following the establishment of US-born Miriam Winslow’s group in the mid-1940s, which dance historians recognize as the frst modern dance company in Argentina.38 While Winslow’s company is identifed as modern dance’s national beginning, modernist choreographers had been presenting work and completing residencies in Buenos Aires since the early twentieth century.39 Across the 1950s and 1960s, the modern dance community grew in dialogue with transnational developments in the form, and contemporary dance as a category emerged during the late twentieth century as a genre related to but distinct from the mid-century techniques associated with modern dance.40 While tango continues to dominate both popular and scholarly conversations about Argentine dance, a growing body of scholarship has begun to explore histories of concert dance in Argentina and the Global South more broadly. This scholarship argues for a transnational approach to concert dance history that does not situate these histories as secondary but rather as integral to the global circuits of exchange that mobilize concert dance production.41 In this light, attention to Nucleodanza’s participation in Tangos and to the role of contemporary dance–based choreography in the tanguedia complicates perceptions of tango as the only dance genre capable of representing rioplatense experiences. Incorporating contemporary dance into the tanguedia’s Third Performance framework both acknowledges its role in Argentine dance history and challenges any singular alignment with empire. Viewers experience one of the most extended glimpses of contemporary dance’s role in the tanguedia during Florence’s rehearsal visit to determine if she can help the exiles produce the show; this is the same scene where she iterates a series of stereotypes about Latin American culture upon meeting the cast. Though set in Paris, the scene was shot in the Tienda San Miguel in Buenos Aires, an ornate building whose interior includes gilded balconies and richly detailed stained glass. This visual confation of here (Paris) with there (Buenos Aires) comments both on the geographic displacement of exile as well as on a history of urban development projects that strove to craft Buenos Aires in Europe’s image around the turn of the twentieth century.42 As Florence and tanguedia collaborator Pierre watch from a balcony, the camera zooms in on the action below. The camera frst captures a mannequin draped in streamers before cutting to Mariana and the troupe of tanguedia dancers, performed by members of Nucleodanza. A male dancer, seated at a table, swigs a drink and leans forward to kiss a mannequin seated across from him. Two female dancers—standing alongside a mannequin’s pelvis and legs—perform rhythmic, robotic sways of the hips with one forearm draped over their eyes. The scene cuts to a group of dancers who partner each other in a tightly choreographed, highly stylized sequence reminiscent of tango. The scenes cut quickly between a couple dancing tango and the Nucleodanza dancers performing a contemporary sequence with suitcases; their movement vocabulary is based in fuid turns, leaps, and leg extensions. Male and female dancers somberly sweep past each other, pausing briefy in embraces that represent the farewells that mark exile.43

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Later glimpses of the tanguedia demonstrate a similarly hybrid movement palette. An arresting duet performed by Nucleodanza members Nora Codina and Guillermo Altamirano titled “There Were Two Exiles” briefy cites tango—the dancers pause occasionally in a close embrace, chests tightly pressed together— though the majority of the movement focuses on virtuosic lifts, leg extensions, and weight shifts rooted in contemporary dance. This poignant, romanticized duet follows an episode in the flm in which Mariana, whose husband is a desaparecido, confronts dictatorship supporters visiting from Buenos Aires at a Parisian social event. They express anger over the name of the tanguedia—The Exile of Gardel—which Mariana announces when introducing the musicians performing at the event. Their heated exchange concludes with one of the visitors accusing Mariana of “subversion,” the dictatorship’s language for political dissent.44 Following this violent argument, Codina’s mournful movement quality stands in for Mariana’s own interrupted mourning process and estrangement from her home. Mariana may never know how her husband died or where his remains rest, and she does not know when she will be able to return to Argentina. The duet articulates the intense vulnerability of exploring these themes. Codina folds into and out of her partner’s body as they execute a movement vocabulary that, unlike the tangos featured in the flm, bears no ostensible cultural markings tied to rioplatense identity (save the few brief echoes of tango’s close embrace). Her back arches, leg and arm extensions, pointed toes, and pirouette turns compliment Altamirano’s vertical spine and stylized lifting. At one point, Codina’s thin, transparent tunic slips of of her body as she dances, leaving her nude save for a pair of briefs. The exposure of Codina’s body, juxtaposed with Altamirano’s clothed one, could be read as extending a cinematic tradition of objectifying female bodies on screen. However, the elusiveness of her body in motion, which continually slips just out of the camera’s view as she executes the dynamic and challenging choreography, comments instead on how the trauma of loss and exile strips the body bare. Codina and Altamirano’s duet invites consideration around how the tanguedia processes not only its performers’ life experiences through a breadth of performance traditions but also of those involved in the production of the flm itself. Codina, whose standout performance grounds the duet, lost her husband to forced disappearance and experienced clandestine detainment and torture herself. She shared with me in an interview that her performance of the duet not only drew on these experiences but also ofered a space for healing through the collective reckoning with the dictatorship that the flm represented.45 The flm’s use of movements associated with Western concert dance to express Mariana’s (and subsequently Codina’s) estrangement from her partner and nation expands the tanguedia’s dance repertoire beyond the tango’s easy association with rioplatense culture and history. Additionally, Nucleodanza dancers perform the only explicit representation of forced disappearance in the flm. In a tanguedia scene that comes nearly at the end of the flm, dancers run terrifed through the balconies of the Tienda

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San Miguel, pursued by men wearing suits and dark sunglasses. Some carry mannequins while others toss armfuls of papers over the balcony as they run. The scene ends when the suit-wearing men capture one of the female dancers, and grasping her four limbs, swing her above their heads in a stylized lift. This scene closely follows a fashback to Mariana’s husband’s forced disappearance, which took place in broad daylight when he was pulled from his car at gunpoint as his terrifed daughter María looked on from the passenger seat.46 Bali and Codina’s recollections of the process of flming the harrowing chase scene, however, point to the limits of performance as a modality for delving into painful pasts. Bali noted that, while she and Tambutti were tasked with choreographing the scene, Solanas intervened heavily, pushing the dancers to embody the intense fear of a pursuit with life and death at stake.47 For Codina, the mandate to replicate the terror she personally experienced blurred the line between productive engagement with a traumatic event (as in her duet with Altamirano) to re-infiction of trauma, pointing to the need to attend to the ethics—and stakes—of representing violence.48 In these scenes, the expressive possibilities of contemporary dance ofer a structure for keeping the body whole as it represents the trauma of the past and the reality of the exilic present. Recall the proliferation of ruptured bodies in the flm. As mentioned earlier, main tanguedia collaborators (including Juan Dos and Pierre) literally explode at critical junctures in the creation process. These characters physically erode over creative diferences in how to tell their story and over struggles to fnd an ending for the performance, a metaphor for and visualization of the corporeal and psychic toll of exile. The broken bodies in these scenes literalize Sara Ahmed’s description of the corporeal efects of exile: “the intrusion of an unexpected space into the body suggests that the experience of a new home involves an expansion and contraction of the skin.”49 While moments in the creation process result in a rupturing of the skin—a literal inability to move forward—the tanguedia suggests that contemporary dance vocabularies offer forms of motion capable of accommodating these expansions and contractions as they attempt to capture the ways that trauma is experienced and stored in the body. At the same time, however, Codina’s of-screen experience flming the chase scene also exposes the point at which dance—and representation more broadly—constitutes a re-traumatization itself. Ultimately, these moments from the tanguedia demonstrate how the flm’s movement vocabularies draw as much on contemporary dance as they rely on tango to express exile and loss. At frst glance, contemporary dance’s presence appears to run counter to Solanas’s conception of the tanguedia as a Third Performance intended to resist legacies of cultural imperialism. For audiences familiar with Solanas’s anti-imperial politics or invested in tango’s exceptional relationship to Argentine identity, contemporary dance’s inclusion begged the question of whether this form’s relationship to Europe and the United States made it an appropriate vehicle for exploring dictatorship and exile. As Tamara Falicov points out in her examination of the flm, some Argentine critics indeed “accused

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Solanas of using tango music and dance that was not truly national but ‘sterilised, very European, not expressive of our tango.’”50 It is unclear whether these critics referred to the tango choreographies featured in the flm or to Nucleodanza’s contributions that, while based in contemporary dance, do cite tango. They may have confated both, pointing to audiences’ conceptions of movement authenticity as well as the limits of dance literacies more broadly. However, it is also possible to read the inclusion of contemporary vocabularies in the tanguedia as a bold claiming of this form as part of Argentine dance history and equally viable resource for political expression. In this light, contemporary dance’s presence constitutes an anti-imperial gesture that decenters the form’s historical and ongoing attachment to the United States and Europe— particularly signifcant within the context of a flm with international reach. It is not implausible that French audiences, for example, met the presence of contemporary dance with surprise at the same time that they fetishized the flm’s focus on tango. Reading contemporary dance as consistent with the tanguedia’s Third Performance frame articulates with scholarship that both acknowledges concert dance’s relationship to the Global North and argues for a consideration of it as equally “Argentine” to the tango.51 One of the frst flms to take up the last military dictatorship as a central theme, Tangos: El exilio de Gardel proposes the act of making performance—and dancing, specifcally—as a privileged mode for representing and processing the experience of political violence and exile. In Solanas’s conception, the tanguedia as a genre summons Argentine performance traditions (tango, sainete, and grotesco criollo, among others) rooted in marginal experiences able to both resist cultural imperialism and speak back to the last military dictatorship, itself understood as a legacy of empire. At the same time, the actual movement vocabularies featured in the flm and employed to express exile and violence tell a broader story. While tango indeed summons a history of dancing displacement and resistance, it also inevitably intersects with the politics of the global political economy of passion. Nucleodanza’s contemporary choreography plays a key role in the tanguedia as well as in the flm’s narrative development, ofering a nuanced vision of cultural identity as it attempts to represent deeply traumatic experiences of violence and loss. Focused attention on the role of dance in the flm, then, not only nuances a rich scholarly conversation on how the flm represents violence and exile but also opens up complex questions about the demands of the global cultural economy (particularly relative to tango as a multivalent signifer) as well as to the politics of marking or unmarking contemporary dance’s relationship to Argentine cultural identity.

Notes 1 See David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), for a detailed historical analysis of this period in Argentina. For a performance studies–based analysis of the last military dictatorship’s disciplinary practices, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts:

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2

3

4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14

15

Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Pablo Yankelevich, “Exiles and the Argentine Diaspora: Issues and Problems,” in Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 198–213 and Marina Franco, “Exile as Rupture, Transformation and Learning Process: Argentineans in France and the Humanitarian Plight,” in Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 183. For a discussion of the intertwining national and neo-imperial forces that shaped the last military dictatorship, see Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). While Tangos features one Uruguayan character, the overwhelming focus of the flm is on Argentine characters and culture, an emphasis refected in this chapter. Coco Fusco, “The Tango of Esthetics & Politics: An Interview with Fernando Solanas.” Cinéaste 16, no. 1/2 (1987/1988): 57. Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). For a discussion of the tension around Argentine modern and/or contemporary dance as a category, see María Eugenia Cadús “La danza escénica durante el primer Peronismo: Formación y práctica de la danza y políticas del estado” (PhD dissertation, University of Buenos Aires, 2017), 29–30. Zuzana M. Pick, The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Projecth (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1993), 167–176; Louise Ciallella, “Between the Look (la Mirada) and the Escape (la fuga): The Imaging of Women in Solanas’ La hora de los hornos and Tangos/El exilio de Gardel.” Feminist Media Studies 3, no. 3 (2003): 301–314; Cécile François, “Tangos, el exilio de Gardel o la revolución estética de Fernando Solanas.” Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura 13 (2005). Accessed June  1, 2018. www. lehman.edu/faculty/guinazu/ciberletras/v13/francois.htm; Christian Wehr, “Memoria cultural, experiencia histórica y perspectiva mesiánica en el cine de Fernando Solanas: Tangos. El exilio de Gardel (1985).” Taller de Letras 49 (2011): 219–230; and Romina Miorelli, “Materialising Exile in Solanas’ Tangos: El Exilio de Gardel.” Modern Languages Open (2016). Accessed June 1, 2018. www.modern languagesopen.org/ article/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.90/. Fernando Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel (Ennetbaden: Trigon-Film, [1985] 2006), DVD. Miorelli, “Materialising Exile in Solanas’ Tangos: El Exilio de Gardel.” Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. Quoted in Ciallella, “Between the Look (la Mirada) and the Escape (la fuga),” 302. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practice, and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, [1969] 1997), 37. Solanas and Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” 42. While Solanas and Getino associated Second Cinema with an emphasis on individual artistic genius, multiple critics have pointed out how aspects of the Third Cinema movement often reafrmed the primacy of the male flm auteur. See Anthony R. Guneratne, “Introduction: Rethinking Third Cinema,” in Rethinking Third Cinema, eds. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16–17. Jorge Rufnelli, “The Three Lives of Fernando Solanas.” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America (Fall 2009): 42. https://archive.revista.drclas.harvard.edu/pages/ past-issues

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16 Fusco, “The Tango of Esthetics & Politics: An Interview with Fernando Solanas,” 59. 17 Fusco, “The Tango of Esthetics & Politics: An Interview with Fernando Solanas,” 57–58. 18 Fusco, “The Tango of Esthetics & Politics: An Interview with Fernando Solanas,” 58. 19 Simón Mizrahi, “Entrevista con Fernando Ezequiel Solanas,” in Tangos: El exilio de Gardel Publicity Dossier (1985), private collection of Nora Codina. Translations by author unless otherwise noted. Un día me dije: ¿por qué no puedo inventar una palabra-síntesis que englobe lo que yo pienso, si desde el Norte nos envían a diario giros, términos y frases que no son nuestras? La tanguedia es mi visión personal sobre esta historia de amor y melancolía…es la suma-síntesis de un tango, más una tragedia, más una comedia. Algunos críticos franceses han hablado de una estética brechtiana: yo diría que es mejor dejar descansar al gran Brecht y hablar de otra cosa. Esa otra cosa es, justamente, la tanguedia, un género nuevo con gran preponderancia del espectáculo musical, y también del sainete rioplatense. 20 Mizrahi, “Entrevista con Fernando Ezequiel Solanas.” 21 For more on both genres, see Manuel Maccarini, Teatro de identidad popular: los géneros sainete rural, circo criollo y radioteatro argentino (Buenos Aires: Inteatro, 2006) and Osvaldo Pellettieri, El sainete y el grotesco criollo: del autor al actor (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2008). 22 Playwright Griselda Gambaro’s work is closely associated with this turn. See Ana Elena Puga, “The Abstract Allegory of Griselda Gambaro’s Stripped (El Despojamiento).” Theatre Journal 56, no. 3 (2004): 415–428. 23 Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. 24 Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. 25 Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. 26 Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. 27 For a succinct discussion of tango’s historical development, see Simon Collier, “The Birth of the Tango,” in The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 196. For deeper attention to tango’s Africanist infuences and relationship to AfroArgentines, see Robert Farris Thompson, Tango: The Art History of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 28 Jorge Salessi, “Medics, Crooks and Tango Queens: The National Appropriation of a Gay Tango,” in Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/ o America, eds. Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, trans. Celeste Fraser Delgado (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 151. 29 Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, 30–31. 30 Julie Taylor, “Death Dressed as a Dancer: The Grotesque, Violence, and the Argentine Tango.” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 3 (2013): 118. 31 Tango scholars have noted that socially danced tango became a way for Argentines at home and in exile to process the experience of political terror, see Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, 12; Julie Taylor, Paper Tangos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 61, 71–72; Taylor, “Death Dressed as a Dancer,” 127; and Gustavo Varela, Tango y política: Sexo, moral burguesa y revolución en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 2006), 187–199. Furthermore, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, a range of contemporary dance works produced from the late 1980s through the early 2000s engaged tango themes and movement vocabularies as an embodied paradigm for approaching the trauma of political violence. See Victoria Fortuna, Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 109–137 and Victoria Fortuna, “Tango and Memory on the Contemporary Dance Stage,” in The Futures of Dance Studies, eds. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020),

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32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

321–341. Among these works is Nucleodanza co-director Susana Tambutti’s 1985 La puñalada (The Stab), a piece that emerged in dialogue with her work choreographing for Tangos, Susana Tambutti, interview by author, Buenos Aires, July 22, 2011. For stand-alone analysis of this work, see Victoria Fortuna, “A Dance of Many Bodies: Moving Trauma in Susana Tambutti’s Lapuñalada.” Performance Research 16, no. 1 (2011): 43–51. Taylor, Paper Tangos, 72. In her analysis of these scenes, François reads the camera’s descent from Thomas and Hotte dancing on the bridge to Mariana and Juan Dos dancing underneath it as representative of a search for and return to tango’s “roots,” embodied in the latter couple’s version of the tango. See François, “Tangos, el exilio de Gardel o la revolución estética de Fernando Solanas.” Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, 1. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, 3 and Taylor, Paper Tangos, 43. In fact, Vincent Canby’s 1986 New York Times review of the flm titled “Argentina ‘Tango’” goes out of its way to explicitly distinguish the tanguedia (translated to English as the “Tango-Dy”) from the Tango Argentino production. Fortuna, Moving Otherwise, 82–83. Susana Tambutti, “100 años de la danza en Buenos Aires.” Funámbulos: Revista bimestral de teatro y danza alterativos 12, no. 3 (2000): 25 and Laura Falcof, “La danza moderna y contemporánea,” in Historia general de la danza en la Argentina, ed. Beatriz Durante (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 2008), 231–321. Fortuna, Moving Otherwise, 14. Fortuna, Moving Otherwise, 10–12. See Prarthana Purkayastha, Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Cadús, “La danza escénica durante el primer Peronismo”; Emily Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); and Fortuna, Moving Otherwise. Adrián Gorelik, Miradas sobre Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004), 74. Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. Nora Codina, interview by author, Buenos Aires, April 12, 2011. Concurrent with her work on Tangos, Codina also took up her experience of clandestine detention and the loss of her husband in her own choreographic works, including Vivos (Alive, 1984) and Suicida (Suicide, 1984). Solanas, Tangos: el exilio de Gardel. Margarita Bali, interview by author, Buenos Aires, May 5, 2011. Codina, interview by author. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (New York: Routledge, 2000), 90. Tamara Falicov, The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film (London: Wallfower Press, 2006), 56. Cadús, “La danza escénica durante el primer Peronismo” and Fortuna, Moving Otherwise.

11 BOLLYWOOD AFFECTS Feeling Brown with Meena Kumari Kareem Khubchandani

The reviews for Miss Meena and the Masala Queens were not kind. Written by Harvey Virdi and directed by Pravesh Kumar for Slough-based Rifco Arts, the play about a faltering British South Asian drag queen club and the endearing cast of misfts that enjoy its sanctuary premiered in Watford in May 2017 before touring fve other locations across England that summer. Critics slammed the show for its simplistic dialogue and minimalist set, a cliché script, and pandering with Bollywood song and dance. Moreover, critics could not get past the play’s nod to La Cage Aux Folles in the Bhangra-remixed version of I Am What I Am during the fnale: “Tottering in the stiletto-heeled footsteps of Kinky Boots and La Cage aux Folles comes this well-meaning but decidedly wobbly play about the ‘gaysian’ drag scene”1; “In terms of drag queen performances, this lacked the fnesse of shows like Priscilla or Kinky Boots and I was disappointed that the fnale – which featured a rendition of La Cage aux Folles’ marvelous I am what I am – didn’t prove to be as magical or rousing as it could have been”2; and “this show evidently aspires to be La Cage aux Folles for the British Asian community … Its audiences, and the real people whose stories it seeks to represent, deserve better.”3 Non-Asian reviewers latched onto the triumphant gay anthem from an English language musical (adapted from a French one), determining the show to be derivative of a Western classic. However, these critics missed deliberate references to Hindi flm icon Meena Kumari that render the show a much more melancholy treatise on queer migrant life than solely a linear gay triumph narrative. The play’s intermedial engagements with Hindi cinema were not lost on South Asian viewers. Blogger Zarina Muhammad on The White Pube evocatively describes a scene in which Miss Meena, owner of the club, brings out her most expensive necklace, ready to part with it in order to save her nightclub. A ghostly fgure embodying Meena Kumari dances in to “Chalte Chalte” from Pakeezah

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haunting the scene in her orange anarkali outft, flling the sad space with her fared skirt. Muhammad writes, For us, in the theatre, as a predominantly asian audience, i don’t think i’m presuming a complicity that isn’t there when i say that this song makes us all feel the same feelings. Sadness, nostalgia, longing and that thing, that pit in ur stomach when u can feel ur eyes watering but it’s also happy too. This song is loaded; and they knew that when they chose it. We watch Miss Meena, watching the dancer: Meena Kumari. There was a really beautiful synchronicity to it all; something so subtle and soothing; but also powerful. Bollywood is notorious at weaponising nostalgia, and the same thing happened here. This was an exercise in feeling. Checking I still could. I still could, i cried. The dancer stops, swirls of stage. The warm spotlight on Miss Meena fades out as she takes of the diamond necklace and i think she was crying too. I am glad we shed these tears together, rather than us both alone.4 Remarkably brief, this moment in the play conjures such acute and overwhelming feelings for an Asian audience member and critic, not simply because Miss Meena has to part with her prized item, but because the ghost of Meena Kumari, famous in the 1950s and 1960s and who died in 1972, carries with her pathos, histrionics, and tragedy. As Vinod Mehta writes about her, In contrast [to her contemporaries Nargis and Madhubala], Meena Kumari, whose flms are seldom shown on TV, evokes victimhood, pathos, despair and consistent bad luck. She played grief-stricken roles in which true love is found but only briefy … she either dies or is abandoned by her man.5 This chapter explores how Meena Kumari becomes a diva, on and of screen, who can serve as a repository of queer feelings that are important and necessary for the sustenance and survival of diasporic South Asians. By detailing a series of queer and feminist diasporic uses of diva worship, I demonstrate that Miss Meena and the Masala Queens follows in a legacy of performances and texts that tap into Meena Kumari as tragedienne to survive the alienations of postcolonial, racial, immigrant, diasporic, queer, femme, or trans life. Divas, according to performance scholar Deborah Parédez, are conduits to self-making: It’s no wonder, then, that when we desire the diva — as with any relationship with the divine — we desire both to possess and to become her. She shatters our categorical divisions between identifcation and desire. And we are thereby rent and remade.6 This chapter writes back to scholarship on diva worship that worries about the “death of camp” as gay and lesbian people acquire greater access to state

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recognition7; for queers of color, the multiple forms of marginality we endure in the wake of racial capitalism and aftermath of empire still drive us to fnd desire, solace, and recognition in sublime fgures such as divas. My turn to afect in this chapter draws from José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of “feeling brown,” which names the emotional registers of Latinx embodiment that (seemingly) exceed the nationally sanctioned and distinctly limited expressions of feeling attributed to/associated with white bodies.8 Muñoz’s analysis of a 1997 Brava Theater production of Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs) in San Francisco explores the range of afliations between Black, Latino, Afro-Latino, Filipino, trans, gay, and queer people in a nightlife setting. He demonstrates how sex, drugs, and sound intensify and abate feeling between characters, allowing emotional work to happen through less traditional (read white) modes of communication. Muñoz’s formulation of “feeling brown” does not assume a prediscursive notion of afect, but it still makes room for the surpluses of sensory meaning that exceed language and that enable minoritarian subjects to fnd afnity with one another. Miss Meena uses the ghost of Meena Kumari to intensify the emotional state and stakes of the play in ways that exceed normative interpretation of what is at face value a feel-good melodrama. The extraneous stagings of Meena Kumari (and of Bollywood song and dance) in the play’s diegesis allow those who learn, enjoy, and feel in the excess of meaning to enter and experience the story diferently. Bollywood—the Hindi-language flm industry—can serve as a tool for practicing racial diference. Scholarship on the global routes of Hindi cinema broadly explore its uptake in diasporic South Asian communities nostalgic for a lost homeland; its popularity in postcolonial nations such as Nigeria and Indonesia given the genre’s family-centered moral universe; and orientalist appropriations of Bollywood in Western markets.9 In the early decades of nation-making, Hindi cinema portrayed diasporic returnees as Westernized fgures, morally corrupt or excessively sexual. Following economic liberalization in the 1990s, when diasporic capital was being wooed into India, Bollywood too recalibrated its depiction of the diaspora to suggest that state-sanctioned values can be inhabited abroad. But such prescriptive flm content does not completely dictate how South Asian migrants take up Bollywood; it functions as subcultural language for Indian teenagers in suburban United States, provides choreographies for British South Asians to perform ethnic diference, works as a site to theorize sexuality and morality relative to whiteness, and becomes a cipher for thinking class and migration in Belgium.10 Rescripting Bollywood’s moral and nationalist universe is particularly clear in queer contexts; despite the genre’s obsessive heteronormativity there is room for queer pleasures and identifcation. Queer engagements with Bollywood have explored the subversive reading practices of same-gender friendships in flm, and the limited representations of sexual and gender minorities in Hindi flms.11 In an essay on queer Asian nightlife in the United Kingdom, Rajinder Dudrah writes about the permissions for play and intimacy Bollywood music provides

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club dancers. The music, and dances associated with it, encourages forms of embodied intimacy particular to South Asian contexts: dosti and yaari, i.e., modes of same-gender friendship that exceed the platonic and that approximate and live alongside heteronormative love.12 I have elsewhere written about how Bollywood dance, particularly the gestures of screen divas Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi, allow queer South Asians to access childhood memories, and the many afects associated with childhood, on the eroticized club dance foor.13 Unlike Dudrah’s essay that is concerned with intimacy enabled by the music and steps, or my previous writing that traces the circulation of dance gestures, in this chapter I attend to the actress herself, her own capacity to incite afective reactions. More broadly, I’m interested in Bollywood’s potential to ofer queer and trans diasporic, migrant, postcolonial subjects alternative capacities to feel, and to perform feeling.

Gaysian Nightlife, Drag, and Drama In describing Miss Meena and the Masala Queens, I want to contextualize its narrative and aesthetics in broader conversations about nightlife, drag, music, Bollywood, and British Asian theatre. Virdi and Kumar, the creators behind the show, conducted research in British Asian gay nightlife scenes, and consulted with local drag queens, to manifest a world that its audiences would recognize. Their nightlife dramaturgy14 is refected in the show’s driving conficts that stage current conversations: the respectability politics of Asian communities; debates around drag and who it serves; and political and economic challenges to sustaining queer nightlife. The play follows Meena, a drag queen struggling to save her empty revue club from a greedy landlord ready to sell the property, and her bossy and bitchy best friend, Munni, who is sleeping with said landlord. While Meena mentors Shaan, a young protégé who has been kicked out of his home, she is revived by the new life he breathes into her establishment and momentarily forgets her coping attachment to the bottle. And yet, as she struggles to save the bar and preserve this haven, she must also grapple with the sudden death of her estranged father. At the top of the show, an image of Hindi flm icon Meena Kumari is projected on the back wall of the theatre, behind the sparse set—metal scafolding bookended by stairs, a neon sign reading “MISS MEENAS,” and a bar centerstage. Kumari’s image fades when the play begins, and we watch as Miss Meena (Raj Ghatak) enters to set up for the day. As she does, Teer-E-Nazar, the fnal song from Pakeezah plays, and a ghostly fgure in a white anarkali outft dances in. Covered in a long-sleeved white bodice connected to a fared panel skirt, with white tight pants underneath, this feminine fgure dances in a semi-classical Kathak style. Her face is obscured by a translucent white dupatta [scarf ] just as Meena Kumari’s is in the flm. Her white skirt fares and, sitting in the front row looking up into the stage, I am amused to see her bulky crotch. The drag ghost of Meena Kumari comes close to Miss Meena momentarily, a deliberate haunting,

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FIGURE 11.1

Rifco Theatre Company’s Miss Meena and the Masala Queens with Raj Ghatak as Miss Meena and Harvey Dhadda as Meena Kumari

Source: David Fisher.

and then she twirls ofstage. Shaan (Nicholas Prasad), supposedly outside the building, longingly watches the neon lights crackle (Figure 11.1). As the ghost exits, the stage bursts to life with the brusque entrance of bitchy Munni ( Jamie Zubairi) and the amateur queens Pinky (Vedi Roy) and Preetho (Harvey Dhadda) soon after. Munni recommends that Meena revamp the empty bar to attract a straight clientele—stag and hen nights—with sexier mujra dances. Munni here refers to a growing form of Pakistani popular entertainment in theatres and online amateur music videos that features buxom women, including sometimes drag queens and transgender women, dancing in sexy, vigorous, and unapologetically vulgar ways to tantalize their audiences.15 Meena dismisses Munni’s suggestion, naming her establishment a “haven” for Asian LGBT people, not a zoo for straight people to gawk.16 Gesturing to the politicized natures of music choice in British Asian nightlife,17 Munni’s penchant for mujra (she later performs the suggestive Gadvi Doodh Wali when she takes possession of the club) refects her own (im)moral character. Implicit in the “straight audiences” of mujra are not only trendy hen and stag nights that enjoy highly sexualized performances but also working-class and immigrant men who might be turned on by the entertainment. The very function of queer nightlife is called into question in the play, challenging the shifting demographics of bar spaces that see more straight attendees as drag gains global respectability with the rising popularity of the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise.18 Gay bars have monetized the presence of drag

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queens and go-go boys to cater to straight women seeking afrming nightlife entertainment while avoiding heterosexual men’s advances. To be clear, no such South Asian drag club exists in the UK, or to my knowledge anywhere. Since the mid-1990s, gaysian nightlife in the UK, much like elsewhere in the diaspora and even subcontinent, has been mapped around parties: Club Kali, Desi Boyz, Disco Rani (London); Saathi Night (Birmingham); Club Zindagi (Manchester); Rang Night (Leicester). These monthly or quarterly events serve as a necessary alternative to the predominantly white and often xenophobic spaces of mainstream commercial gay nightlife.19 They regularly feature performances by drag artists,20 famously captured in the photography of Red Threads and the short documentary Bijli (Adnan Malik, 2003).21 Depicting a brick-and-mortar establishment of this kind, Miss Meena distorts the current state of queer South Asian nightlife, while perhaps also depicting the possibility of a diferent kind of gaysian world. In the US, there are queer bars serving Black, Latinx, and East Asian folks, while there are South Asian and Caribbean straight bars in the UK. The notion of an ethnically specifc queer bar is not necessarily strange, and yet queer South Asian nightlife spaces exist only as “nights” and not as “bars.” Miss Meena afords us an opportunity to imagine the kinds of world-making that could happen if this was indeed a place we could inhabit, alongside the material and emotional complexities it would take to maintain such a bar. The arrival of the bumbling, excitable construction workers Pinky and Preetho enlivens the tense space as they request to audition for Meena’s dwindling cast. They dig out costumes and wigs from their work bag, and fetch Shaan of the street to serve as an unbiased arbiter for their performance. Shaan is a nineteen-year-old mixed-race Irish-Punjabi boy feeing a homophobic home who fnds temporary refuge in Meena’s “haven.” Shaan’s multiracial identity— both his parents dislike his queerness—importantly implies that homophobia is not unique to Asian homes. Over the course of the play, we watch Pinky and Preetho blossom into professional queens, while also witnessing Preetho negotiate a separation from an arranged marriage. Shaan too, under Meena’s tutelage, becomes a drag queen, while also working in the bar to earn his keep. This small ensemble refects the variety of people one might encounter at gaysian party nights: mentors and ingénues, feminine and masculine, young and old, dancers and non-dancers, working-class boys and over-styled queens, Bollywood divas and Pop princesses, married (to women) and single, supported and rejected by family. In Pinky and Preetho’s dances, we see the range of Asian drag itself: Sridevi’s highly expressive 1980s style, contemporary Bollywood hip-hop, Katy Perry’s “Firework,” and disco number “Jawane Janeman.” Miss Meena packs in a diverse vision of gaysian nightlife, while also telling the individualized stories of these characters and their struggles with various forms of heteronormativity. The show also stages queer diasporic nightlife as a site of gender and ethnic pedagogy as we witness Shaan’s education in divas of Indian cinema, makeup, and walking in heels. As Preetho and Pinky rehearse new choreographies, they refer to each

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other as Behn-ji [sister], making visible what Marlon Bailey calls “kin labor,” a term he develops to name how Black queer Ballroom communities develop intimate relations in the various bodily and emotional eforts in nightlife that cultivate a home-like space.22 The bar’s lack of success is mapped around both Meena’s depression since her separation from a lover as well as the implied niche quality of a gaysian drag bar—it would, as Munni implies, do better if it catered to white and straight people. Meena’s struggle to keep the bar is made more difcult by a lecherous landlord, Ranjeet (Ali Ariaie). Disinterested in Meena’s martyr cause, Munni blackmails city councilor Ranjeet, who she is sleeping with, to acquire the lease for herself. As landlord and politician, Ranjeet functions as a metonym for institutional power; moreover, Munni’s ability to blackmail him—he is married with kids—demonstrates how heteronormativity colludes with state and economy. Munni ousts Meena from the bar, taking advantage of Meena’s absence during her father’s funeral. Munni only realizes the error of her ways when a lascivious Ranjeet demands to sleep with Shaan and against her better judgement she arranges this encounter. Ali Ariaie also plays Kabir, Meena’s brother, who arrives to inform Meena that her estranged father has passed. Meena, in an attempt to reconcile with the rest of her family and honor her father, agrees to travel to Pakistan for an arranged marriage; these transnational matrimonial networks secure diasporic heteronormativity.23 Preetho and Pinky rush to catch Meena, somberly dragging a suitcase across the stage toward a check-in gate, in the nick of time. Handing her her best high heels, they explain Shaan’s departure following the incident with Ranjeet. They convince Meena to return to the bar, where she gets to say farewell to Shaan before he leaves to London, and a remorseful Munni gives her back the lease. The team celebrates with a drag show featuring several very quick changes and a lively audience response. Even Kabir attends and reconciles with Meena. Miss Meena and the Masala Queens is a feel-good melodrama in which each character’s high-stakes conficts are largely resolved by the end. In addition to the various socio-political issues it addresses—homophobia, closets, arranged marriage, gentrifcation—it entertains with Bollywood song and dance. Careful effort is put into the dance sequences, and Preetho and Pinky’s elaborate outfts and choreography keep the mood playful. That the show relies on the populist and frivolous aesthetics of Bollywood is a critique launched not only by reviewers of this show but also at Rifco Arts in general.24 Anamik Saha details the creative ways that Rifco Arts recruits Asian theatre-goers, particularly working-class audiences: Bollywood and Bhangra references, punny play titles, long-term outreach work in Asian communities in multiple languages, and touring the show across regions to reach audiences where they are.25 Artistic director of Rifco, Pravesh Kumar, acknowledges the gaps in cultural capital between working-class Asians, whose primary form of entertainment are variety shows and Indian cinema, and more elite theatre-goers, who might enjoy the dark realism of other British Asian theatre. Kumar seeks to bridge these gaps with his populist style.

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Saha situates the unique work of Rifco’s aesthetic style and audience-building within the long-term neglect of British Asian cultural production by national funding institutions26 and the more recent slashing of public funding for minoritarian arts. Rifco’s marketing and outreach tactics to reach British Asian theatre-goers suggest that their audience would be familiar, if not deeply resonate with, the ghosting of Meena Kumari throughout the play. As Zarina Muhammad writes, “This song is loaded; and they knew that when they chose it.”27 The few moments with Meena Kumari exceed the play’s diegesis; they don’t assist with the storyline except to incite afective response from those in the know. What follows is a detailing of Meena Kumari’s divahood, a variety of queer employments of her divadom, and fnally a return to Miss Meena and the Masala Queens to explore the brown feelings she enables in the show.

Tragedienne What story should I start with? The one in which Meena Kumari at age six auditions for Kamal Amrohi, the director who would eventually become her husband? The one in which she famously portrays an alcoholic having never drunk before, but eventually dies of alcoholism-related illness herself? The one about her star-crossed love with industry newcomer Dharmendra? Or the one in which she dies two months after the release of her most popular flm Pakeezah, which took ten years to complete due to her illness and her divorce from Amrohi? Born to a musician father, Ali Bux, and a dancer mother, Iqbal Begum, in August 1932, Meena Kumari was originally named Mahjbeen. While her mother had to renounce her Bengali Christian faith upon marriage, Mahjbeen had to give up her Muslim name to pass in the flm industry as Meena Kumari. Her parents’ roots in the entertainment industry drove her curiosity to explore the flm studios across from her home, and by age four, this precocious child had wooed studio guards, producers, and directors and appeared in fve flms in a span of four years.28 By eighteen, she stumbled upon the in-demand director Kamal Amrohi’s image in a magazine and was fxated. She took up the frst opportunity she had to work with him, on Anarkali. Though the flm never completed production, it allowed Amrohi and Kumari’s romance to blossom into a clandestine marriage. Her allegiance to Amrohi eventually led to a dispute with her father in which she packed up her saris and left, and he closed the doors on her. But as she rose as a cinematic star, receiving Filmfare Awards for her roles as the seductive lush in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam and the village girl in Baiju Bawra—in 1962 all three nominees for Best Actress were Meena Kumari29 —her relationship with Amrohi deteriorated as he became jealous of her stardom. She turned to brandy to help her sleep. Still married to Amrohi, she fell for Dharmendra, a married man whom she could never call her own. Her addiction to alcohol left her with cirrhosis of which she eventually died.

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Prior to separating from Amrohi, the two began work on Pakeezah [The Pure One], the story of courtesan Sahebjan (played by Meena Kumari) whose mother Nargis (also played by Meena Kumari) dies in a cemetery, rejected by the child’s grandfather who would not tolerate a courtesan in his family. The child is rescued by her aunt, but continues to be haunted by the stigma of being a dancer and sex worker as she grows up and fnds love herself. Delays on flming due frst to Meena Kumari’s illness, followed by Amrohi’s need to reshoot the decadent scenes in color as technology transitioned meant that the flm took ten years to produce. Within two months of its release, Meena Kumari died from her alcohol-related illnesses. Pakeezah extends a genre of Muslim courtesan flms that stages the dancing courtesan inside elaborately styled kothas [salons] where men come to witness and pay for her beauty, poetry, music, dance, and sex. The genre evokes precolonial nostalgia that places the Muslim other in India’s past, situating the courtesan as a fgure to be rescued and brought into the patriarchal folds of modern (Hindu) citizenship.30 In the flm, a traveler falls in love with Sahebjan’s feet when he sees her on a train, leaving a note between her toes requesting she never subject her feet to dirt.31 It is the feet he so admires that Sahebjan then destroys by dancing on shards of a shattered chandelier enraptured by sadness when she has to perform at this very man’s wedding. And while her bloody spectacle and disheveled hair enables a reconciliation not only with her admirer but also her grandfather who condemned the marriage between her biological parents, it is only what Lauren Berlant describes as a diva gesture that enables such closure: “Diva Citizenship occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere, in which she does not have privilege. Flashing up and startling the public she puts the dominant story into suspended animation.”32 As Anupama Kapse argues, Sahebjan staining the white sheets she dances on as well as the white dress she wears gains its performative weight from the purity associated with white cloth under Indian modernity. Across her career, Meena Kumari employed white saris and clothing to manage the sexual stigma associated with her body.33 Kumari’s life on and of screen weave together.34 She plays the part of a dancer, the very profession her mother was stigmatized for and thus cost her sister an engagement.35 Her performance as the courtesan who did not deserve love was flmed at the same time as her own love for Dharmendra could not manifest. Her conficts are not simply individualized but also systemic. Acts of bodily reclamation by Sahebjan and by Meena Kumari—dancing on glass, trying to escape the kotha, reclaiming the white color, leaving her father’s home, divorcing Kamal Amrohi, refusing to flm Pakeezah—were diva acts arising from gender subordination, religious hierarchy, and sexual stigma. That she was born to a Muslim family, and played a Muslim courtesan on screen, scripted her into the role of religious and racial other in Hindi cinema.36 Meena Kumari’s pursuit of desire and pleasure on her terms, as well as her role as Sahebjan the courtesan, make her a sexual other. I’m suggesting here that the common invocation of Meena Kumari as “tragedienne” not only references the series of sad moments and consequences

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in her life mapped around her singular narrative but also recalls the ways she negotiated and performed gender, sexuality, religion, and pleasure on and of screen. To invoke her in performance is to invite a particularly politicized pathos that stages the tragedy of postcolonial and diasporic marginality.

Queer Diasporic Uses of Meena Kumari Meena Kumari is ubiquitous in South Asian queer cultures. When South Asians marry Americans or Europeans for citizenship, gay men mock them as “Visa Kumari.” In Mahesh Dattani’s play, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, the set requires “a huge poster of Meena Kumari in Pakeezah [that] ofers relief to the stark white wall.” The poster belonged to Sharad, the ex-boyfriend of protagonist Kamlesh. Sharad regularly gestures to the poster to perform sarcastic and overdramatic outbursts of emotion, playing the spurned woman in order to make fun of Kamlesh’s uptight air.37 In the campy gay Singaporean play Asian Boys Vol. 1, Meena Kumari features in a pantheon of global divas, particularly signaling Indian divadom in the multiracial postcolony.38 Truly, she is one of our most recognizable divas. The sexual stigma she embodies in Pakeezah works as convenient subtext for queer comparison, and she is a favorite icon for Indian and Pakistani drag queens.39 Classic literature on diva worship tracks how gay men and proto-queer boys identify with the excesses of gender performed by screen queens and opera singers, and how queers convene under her watch.40 Meena Kumari fts the bill well. Her melancholy life is also ripe for identifcation with queers living closeted lives, those worrying they will end up alone, or those mourning the loss of a lover. However, some queer scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the diva as a cipher for queer feelings as we move toward homonormative structures that fold LGBT people into liberal capitalist citizenship.41 Indeed, the uncloseting of diva excesses and subaltern politics into explicit afrmations by the likes of Lady Gaga and her song “Born This Way” turns camp into a commodifed aesthetic as opposed to a sensibility born of an “epistemology of the closet.”42 And yet, the move toward a liberal politics, mapped around good feelings and notions of teleological progress, does not summon all queers. Nitin Manayath writes in his treatise on Meena Kumari and “all that was lost with her”: my desire for the melancholic will make me return to Meena Kumari. Her voice, sharpened to cut, calls to us, leading us into an enchanted world of languid pleasurable pain and, despite the second wave feminist flm scholar in me protesting loudly, I am guilty of wanting my bad girls to die on screen—ghungroos [ankle bells] slicing into soft skin, stain upon stain of scarlet blood, a face draining into pallid death—and for me to die with them, once more, forever.43 Histrionic divas such as Meena Kumari are a cipher for “feeling backward,” an afective move to resist the liberal impulse toward satisfed gay liberation and

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state subjection.44 “Pallid death” is much more satisfying than rescue by patriarchs or second-wave feminism—it leaves open the option of being a “bad girl.” Moreover, the literature on diva worship, mapped around axes of gender and sexuality as sites for the production of melancholy and identifcation, fail to register the additional axes by which fans might desire, identify, and commune with the diva. Deborah Parédez beautifully maps the contours of fandom for Tejano singer Selena across a variety of Latinx communities.45 Selena’s unabashed performances of working-class Latina excess through her body—wide hips hugged by tight clothes, sultry makeup, her love of fast food—become invitations for adoration from her Latinx fans. Her tragic narrative, going to a hotel against her father’s wish where she was shot by her “friend” Yolanda Saldivar, avails itself to queer interpretations too. What is especially compelling about Parédez’s work is the range of people who worship Selena, and the variety of axes through which people fnd afliation with her. Studies that conceptualize a waning interest in the diva in homonormative times fail to track the various other social conditions that produce “public feelings”—class, race, postcoloniality, transness—that the diva can help us manage. Also, as Stacy Wolf argues, diva worship is not simply how we feel about the queen but what we do with her.46 Several diasporic artists take up Meena Kumari as a means of performing brown feelings. Gayatri Gopinath has detailed how Ayub Khan-Din’s flm East Is East uses “Inhi Logon Ne”—the opening number in Pakeezah that features Meena Kumari as Nargis, Sahebjan’s mother, performing in the kotha, chiding the men who try to shame her for her profession. In East Is East, Mina Khan, the sole daughter amongst seven siblings, sweeps the backyard in galoshes while dancing to the song, scripting her diasporic domestic labor over the embodied sexual labor of the courtesan. Gopinath writes, “the enactment of Pakeezah’s song and dance becomes a way to critique the various disciplinary discourses of purity, modesty, and sexual morality that are fxed onto her body by hegemonic diasporic and nationalist ideologies.”47 As Gopinath notes, it is not solely gender that connects Mina and Meena Kumari but also the ways that racialized and religious expectations of femininity in both the UK and Pakistan style Mina’s body and make her use of the “liminal courtesan” a more astute critique. In Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s Ode to Lata, Kenyan Indian Ali perpetually turns to the voice of Lata Mangeshkar—Hindi flm songs are performed by playback singers who do not appear in the flm. It is Lata who voices a majority of Meena Kumari’s songs in Pakeezah. Ali, making fun of his efeminate friend Salman, says, On [his answering machine], he has the campiest song from one of Hindi cinema’s classics, Pakeezah. Meena Kumari starred in it as a courtesan, lip-synching to Lata Mangeshkar’s “Inhi Logo Ne,” declaring how she had been exploited by every man from the postman to the policeman. The song should have been the litmus test for any Indian parent to discover a son’s homosexuality. The infamous Pakeezah song.48

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Dhalla, through Ali, meditates on the efcacy of diva worship, discussing his Kenyan Indian aunties as intermediaries for flm divas: Just like scores of Indian women who have learned to identify with the martyred heroines of Hindi flm, I’ve also learned to relate to them … I don’t burst out into song and dance, but I’ve come to believe in this melodrama.49 More than just camp fun, the tragedienne is a tool for feeling and performing emotional excess in the everyday for women and gay men. Throughout Dhalla’s novel, Lata’s voice haunts Ali who hums her tunes and recalls her lyrics as he wanders through the labyrinth of Los Angeles bathhouses, feels ashamed at his own anti-Black racism, worries about HIV infection, deals with his unwelcome visiting mother, recalls trysts with now-married Indian men in Kenya, and bemoans his brown skin in a white-privileging gay world. As ambient sound, diva worship of Meena Kumari and Lata Mangeshkar expresses various kinds of melancholia in diasporic queer life.50 Ashvin Kini’s short flm Meena Kumari Made Me Do It features an interview with the flmmaker’s mother, recorded via an online video-chat interface, spliced with footage of flmic courtesans, and other images. Kini introduces the flm by telling us that his mother’s beauty has often been compared to Meena Kumari’s. In snippets, she speaks of the unequal race relations in Kenya where she was born, and her choice to migrate to North America. She says in these sound bytes, “I have such good memories after the sadness was gone”; “You’ll help me write my book won’t you Ashvin? It will have one sad then one happy ending”; and “If I could make this into an Indian movie, it would be a tearjerker.” Kini cuts these melodramatic feelings with clips of “Thade Rahiyo” from Pakeezah, in which Meena Kumari confdently and seductively sings of the beauty ritual she uses to prepare for a night with a lover. Slipped between these clips and interviews are worn family photos; photo-rosters of indentured Indian laborers; and photographs of grafti, posters, and banners critiquing racial profling and capitalism. Kini layers his mother’s story of travel with the uneven promises of migration—geographic displacement does not necessarily aford a better life for Black and Brown people. The addition of a chugging train sound that appears in Kini’s video, the vehicle of modern expansion under racial capitalism and metonym of modernity, alludes also to Sahebjan’s train journey in Pakeezah and the dire consequences of her migration in the flm.51 In Vinod Mehta’s biography of Meena Kumari, he too tracks the diva’s movements across Bombay, as she takes up residences across the urban terrain, and the tragic consequences of these drastic moves. The courtesan in Kini’s video expresses feminine glamor, like his mother’s, alongside the melancholies of migration.

Miss Meena and Meena Kumari Diva worship is not merely a celebration of her radical gender but, in queer diasporic contexts, is also a cipher of negative afect—shame, loneliness, pain—that

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helps one perform the melancholy of displacement. So then, let’s return to Miss Meena and the Masala Queens. The play opens with the ghost of Meena Kumari performing “Teer-E-Nazar,” the song in which she impales her feet on broken glass. And while the veiled dancing fgure on stage does not complete the song to its bloody end, the play begins with feelings of feminine martyrdom. Miss Meena not only names herself after Meena Kumari, but her character, left by her lover and taking to the bottle, parallels both the actress and her role as Nargis in Pakeezah. The ghosting doesn’t do anything for the narrative, but it functions as an afective chorus that opens foodgates of feelings. When Miss Meena realizes that she must sell her mother’s necklace to refurbish her club in the hopes of saving it, the ghost of Meena Kumari comes on stage again to dance to “Chalte Chalte.” Unlike the flmic convention in which the protagonist breaks into song to express her interiority, in Miss Meena, this dancing ghost comes in to give feeling both to the actor and the audience. In Pakeezah, Sahebjan morosely sings and dances to “Chalte Chalte” in deference to an important client, but awaiting her preferred admirer. The flm song ends in a train whistle, reminding us of the moment when the man met her beautiful feet. As the ghost dances on stage, an auntie sitting beside me sings along to the song, rocking her body to the rhythm. Here, she too feels Brown with the song, performing the role of audience improperly in the theatre seats by singing out loud. It is such moments of interpellation that make clear that these afective capsules are indeed efective. One theatre critic is surprised by the dialogue produced with the audience, though their interpretation takes a strange turn to rights-based discourse: Intriguingly, it was the many Asian women in the audience who were clapping along to the numbers and cheering the “girls” standing up for themselves. For them, these Masala Queens seem to making a statement about women’s rights as well as those of their transvestite sisters.52 Auntie is again invited into dialogue with the show, completing Sahebjan’s sentences as Miss Meena lip-synchs to one of Pakeezah’s most famous monologues. Sahebjan has run away from the man she is to marry, afraid that she can never escape the stigma of being a courtesan, and delivers an iconic monologue describing the courtesan as a living corpse, and the bazaar [market / brothel] as a cemetery.53 Miss Meena, dressed in boy clothes, recites the monologue during a scene dramatizing her father’s funeral, allowing herself to be possessed by the voice of Meena Kumari. The lip-synch’s references to “corpse” and “cemetery” correspond to the funeral scene, but seem more relevant to Miss Meena’s own abject body and dance establishment. In many ways, Sahebjan’s monologue makes little diegetic sense in this scene, as does a lip-synch “act” in this moment, but it invites me, and auntie beside me, to feel the despair—even perform it in our own lips—that Miss Meena does as she sacrifces her authentic feminine self for diasporic respectability. Miss Meena’s use of Meena Kumari in diasporic public culture functions as much more than intertext. Her iconicity carries deep afective resonances that

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might read as nostalgic feminine glamour but are weighted with sadness, despair, and melancholy. She is sampled more so than cited in these works to incite brown feelings; more than a referent with symbolic meaning, she is an intensifer of sensation and sentiment. Queer diasporic works like East Is East, Meena Kumari Made Me Do It, Ode to Lata, and Miss Meena and the Masala Queens employ the diva to feel Brown in the wake of colonization, gentrifcation, racism, displacement, homophobia, heteronormativity, and sexism. If we read Miss Meena’s return to the club from the airport and fnal drag performance as a celebration, how do we make sense of the pathos that Meena Kumari brings to the show’s entirety? Perhaps a clue is in the closing reference to La Cage Aux Folles. Miss Meena returns to the club, the cage. In Pakeezah, Sahebjan’s guardian clips the wings of the caged bird in her room, “expressing once again [her] imprisonment and the impossibility of her escape.”54 While Shaan leaves the nightclub and heads onward to London, where a more respectable queer life might be possible, Miss Meena remains. She must stay to toil, as dancer, manager, mother, and martyr.

Notes 1 Sam Marlowe, “Theatre: Miss Meena and the Masala Queens at Watford Theatre,” The Times, 16 May 2017. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/theatre-miss-meena-andthe-masala-queens-at-watford-palace-theatre-lpnhjfvm9. 2 Jackie Bryans, “Review: Miss Meena and the Masala Queens,” Essential Surrey and SW London, 31 May 2017. www.essentialsurrey.co.uk/theatre-arts/review-miss-meenamasala-queens-windsor/. 3 Claire Alfree, “A Well Intentioned Drag,” The Telegraph, 10 May 2017. www. t eleg r aph.co.u k /t he at re/wh at - to - see/d r a g -m i s s -meen a -m a s a l a - queen s watford-palace-theatre-review/. 4 Zarina Muhammad, “Miss Meena and the Masala Queens @ Watford Theatre.” The White Pube. www.thewhitepube.co.uk/miss-meena. 5 Vinod Mehta, Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography (Noida: Harper Collins 2013; frst published Jaico Publishing House, 1972), xvii. 6 Deborah Parédez, “Lena Horne and Judy Garland: Divas, Desire, and Discipline in the Civil Rights Era.” TDR: The Drama Review 58, no. 4 (2014): 106. 7 Daniel Harris, “The Death of Camp: Gay Men and Hollywood Diva Worship, from Reverence to Ridicule.” Salmagundi 112 (Fall 1996): 166–191. 8 José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Afect in Ricardo Bracho’s ‘the Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs).’” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 67–79. 9 Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005); Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, eds., Global Bollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, eds., Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 10 Shalini Shankar, “Reel to Real: Desi Teen Linguistic Engagements with Bollywood.” Pragmatics 14, no. 2/3 (2004): 317–336; Ann David, “Beyond the Silver Screen: Bollywood and Filmi Dance in the UK.” South Asia Research 27, no. 1 (2007): 5–24; Purnima Mankekar, Unsettling India: Afect, Temporality, Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Iris Vandevelde, “Revisiting the NRI ‘Genre’: Indian Diasporic Engagements with NRI and Multiplex Films.” South Asian Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (2013): 47–60. 11 Gayatri Gopinath, “Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema.” Journal of Homosexuality 39, no. 3/4 (2000): 283–297; Ashok Row Kavi, “The  Changing Image of the Hero.” Journal of Homosexuality 39, no.

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12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

3/4 (2000): 307–312; Raj R. Rao, “Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywood-Style.” Journal of Homosexuality 39, no. 3/4 (2000): 299–306; Shohini Ghosh, “False Appearances and Mistaken Identities: The Phobic and the Erotic in Bombay Cinema’s Queer Vision,” in The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, eds. Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya (New York: Seagull, 2007): 417–435. Rajinder Kumar Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 127. Kareem Khubchandani, “Snakes on the Dance Floor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender.” The Velvet Light Trap 77 (2016): 69–85. Ben Burrata, “Dance-Floor Dramaturgy: Unlearning the Shame and Stigma of HIV through Theatre.” Theatre Topics 30, no. 2 (2020), 57–68. These mujras have an extensive virtual life on YouTube and videos are widely available in the diaspora. Where the term mujra traditionally refers to the salon-style performances of highly trained courtesans for aristocracy in majority Muslim precolonial India as one might see in the flm Pakeezah, the term now refers to a vernacular dance form performed for mixed-class audiences. Saad Khan, “‘We Navigate a Man’s World in Women’s Bodies’: Surviving as a Modern Mujra Dancer in Pakistan,” Scroll. in, 9 Jun 2017. https://scroll.in/magazine/839997/we-navigate-a-mans-world-infemale-bodies-surviving-as-a-modern-mujra-dancer-in-pakistan; Claire Pamment, Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bhānd (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 136. Jason Orne and Dylan Stuckey, Boystown: Sex & Community in Chicago (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 23. On the longer history of political contestation in British Asian music, see: Falu Bakrania, Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Cory G. Collins, “Drag Race to the Bottom? Updated Notes on the Aesthetic and Political Economy of Rupaul’s Drag Race.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 1 (2017): 128–134. Alpesh Patel, “Re-imagining Manchester as a Queer and Haptic Brown Atlantic Space,” in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, eds. Encarnación Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 119. Kareem Khubchandani, “Drag, Asian,” in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, ed. Howard Chiang, Anjali Arondekar, Marc Epprecht, Jennifer Evans, Ross G. Forman, Hanadi Al-Samman, Emily Skidmore and Zeb Tortorici, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019), 478–483. Poulomi Desai and Parminder Sekhon, Red Threads: The South Asian Queer Connection in Phogoraphs (London: Diva Books, 2003). Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013). Kareem Khubchandani, “Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 20 (2019). https://journals.openedition. org/samaj/5118. Mrunal Chavda, “If Only Bollywood… The Case of British Asian Theatre.” South Asian Popular Culture 13, no. 3 (2014): 235–250. Anamik Saha, “The Politics of Race in Cultural Distribution: Addressing Inequalities in British Asian Theatre.” Cultural Sociology 11, no. 3 (2017): 302–317. Jerri Daboo, “The Art Britain Still Ignores?” Studies in Theatre and Performance 38, no. 1 (2018): 3–8. Muhammad, “Miss Meena.” www.thewhitepube.co.uk/miss-meena. Mehta, Meena Kumari, 20–21. Mehta, Meena Kumari, 77. Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2006); Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Richard Allen and Ira Bhaskar, “Pakeezah: Dreamscape of Desire.” Projections 3, no. 2 (2009): 20–36.

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31 Patricia Uberoi, “Dharma and Desire, Freedom and Destiny: Rescripting the ManWoman Relationship in Popular Hindi Cinema,” in Embodiment: Essays in Gender and Identity, ed. Meenakshi Thapan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997): 147–173. 32 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 223. 33 Anupama Kapse, “Women in White: Femininity and Female Desire in 1960s Bombay Melodrama,” in Film, Fashion, and the 1960s, eds. Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, and Louise Wallenberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017): 149–168. 34 Rosie Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 11, no. 3 (1989): 11–30. 35 Mehta, Meena Kumari, 19. 36 John Caldwell, “The Movie Mujrā: The Trope of the Courtesan in Urdu-Hindi Film.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 32 (2010): 123. 37 Jisha Menon, “Queer Self hoods in the Shadow of Neoliberal Urbanism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 26, no. 1 (2013): 100–119. 38 Eng-Beng Lim, “Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore.” Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 383–405. 39 Parmesh Shahani, Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008). 40 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993); Brett Farmer, “The Fabulous Sublimity of Gay Diva Worship.” Camera Obscura 20, no. 2 (2005): 164–195. 41 Craig Jennex, “Diva Worship and the Sonic Search for Queer Utopia.” Popular Music and Society 36, no. 3 (2013): 343–359; Jimmy Draper, “What Has She Actually Done??!”: Gay Men, Diva Worship, and the Paratextualization of Gay-Rights Support.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 2 (2017): 130–137. 42 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 43 Nithin Manayath, “Inhi Logon Ne: Meena Kumari and All That Was Lost with Her,” The Big Indian Picture, 2013. http://thebigindianpicture.com/2013/03/inhilogon-ne/. 44 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 45 Deborah Parédez, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 46 Stacy Wolf, “Wicked Divas, Musical Theater, and Internet Girl Fans.” Camera Obscura 65, no. 22:2 (2007): 39–71. 47 Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 87. 48 Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla, Ode to Lata (Los Angeles, CA: Really Great Books, 2002). 49 Dhalla, Ode to Lata, 45. 50 Neepa Majumdar, “The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Bombay Cinema,” in Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 176. 51 Caldwell, “The Movie Mujrā,” 125. 52 Howard Loxton, “Miss Meena and the Masala Queens,” British Theatre Guide. www. britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/miss-meena-and-watford-palace-14375. 53 In this moment, the play draws on new trends in drag performance to not only lip-synch music but also spoken word. Lip-synching to flmic dialogue has become simpler given easily accessible software that allows artists to rip sound digitally and incorporate it into performance tracks. 54 Allen and Bhaskar, “Pakeezah: Dreamscape of Desire,” 32.

12 SOUNDING ASIAN AMERICAN Geeks and Superheroes in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone Esther Kim Lee

In October 2016, I attended the National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival (ConFest) at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon. One of the most anticipated events during the ConFest was the production of Qui Nguyen’s play Vietgone, directed by May Adrales. The play was part of OSF’s regular season and had garnered national attention as one of the most exciting new plays of the year. It premiered in 2015 at South Coast Repertory, which also commissioned it, and received major awards.1 On the weekend of the ConFest, the Manhattan Theatre Club, which co-produced the play, was previewing it for its New York City premiere. Needless to say, the audience expectation for the production at the ConFest was high, and the atmosphere of the house was festive. Here was a play that was being produced at major regional theatres on both coasts of the country and receiving positive reviews, and it was being showcased at the most important gathering of Asian American theatre artists. It was indeed a special and celebratory event. When Nguyen was commissioned to write Vietgone, he was known for his work with Vampire Cowboys, a theatre company he co-founded with Robert Ross Parker in 2000 when they were graduate students at Ohio University. They moved the company to New York City in 2002, and the company quickly rose to popularity, receiving an Obie Award in 2010. As the frst theatre company to be sponsored by New York Comic Con, Vampire Cowboys describes itself as “Geek Theatre” company that “creates and produces new works of theatre based in action/adventure and dark comedy with a comic book aesthetic.”2 According to Nguyen, the Geek Theatre of Vampire Cowboys is “a mixture of pop culture fun and strong imaginative theatricality. All their productions use puppetry, music, original songs, multimedia, and loads of frst class fght choreography to tell their stories.”3 As Jason Zinoman of The New York Times puts it, what infuenced Vampire Cowboys and Qui Nguyen are “the Simpsons, hip-hop and

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any movie with ferce women and guns.”4 Indeed, the company has insisted on producing plays that are “built on character, heart, and those often ignored by mainstream pop culture as the centerpieces of their shows.”5 During his collaboration with Vampire Cowboys, Nguyen developed his style of playwriting and wrote a number of plays including Soul Samurai, She Kills Monsters, and Alice in Slasherland. Nguyen’s plays showcase characters that seem to come right out of comic books in action-packed scenes. Projection is frequently used to make the set resemble comic-book storyboards, and stage directions instruct characters to move like gravity-defying and time-warping superheroes. Nguyen’s characters speak in American slang, and hip-hop music is frequently used in performances. Vietgone includes all of these dramatic devices, but the play departs from Nguyen’s earlier plays by telling a romantic story about real people. In the play, Nguyen tells how his parents met at a refugee camp in Arkansas after they escaped from war-torn Saigon in 1975. Nguyen takes much liberty with his interpretation of their meeting and calls the play “a sex comedy about my parents.”6 In an interview, he recalls how he grew up listening to his parents’ stories and how he comprehended them: When my parents told me stories about Vietnam, they told me the real stories, what actually happened. […] But what I imagined was kung fu movies. Because the only things I ever saw [growing up] that had a lot of Asian people in it, were kung fu movies.7 Kung Fu is indeed in the play, but two other infuences from Nguyen’s youth need to be underscored. His parents ended up staying in Arkansas after leaving the refugee camp, and Nguyen grew up in a predominantly African American neighborhood where he participated in freestyle rap battles. His experience as an Asian American growing up in the South in an African American neighborhood is as important as his interest in comic books and martial arts. Perhaps Zinoman puts it best when he asks, “What does assimilation mean to a VietnameseAmerican playwright who grew up in Arkansas, married a white woman and feels black in his ‘heart?’”8 (Figure 12.1). The play is about war refugees who must restart their lives in a foreign land while facing the challenges of learning a new language, eating strange food, and realizing that they may never return home to Vietnam. Quang, based on Nguyen’s father, is a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and is described by the playwright as “adventurous, charming, rugged” (7). He has a wife and children in Vietnam but gets separated from them during the fall of Saigon in 1975. He ends up in a war refugee camp in Fort Chafe, Arkansas, with his friend Nhan, but he wants to return to his family in Vietnam. In a desperate attempt, Quang gets on an old motorcycle with Nhan and rides cross-country to California in the hopes of getting back to Vietnam. But he ultimately realizes that he cannot go home. Tong, based on Nguyen’s mother, is a thirty-year-old woman who is “strong-willed, efortlessly sexy, and fercely independent” (7). Tong is

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FIGURE 12.1

James Ryen (Quang) and Will Dao (Nhan) in Vietgone at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2017.

Source: Jenny Graham.

in the camp with her mother, Huong, and both feel guilty about leaving Tong’s brother in Vietnam and worry that he may be dead. Despite her independent and strong demeanor, Tong sufers from nightmares of her loved ones dying in Vietnam. In the midst of the traumatic chaos at the camp, Quang and Tong get together at frst for sex, but they eventually fall in love. Despite the seriousness of the story, the play is a comedy in the style of Geek Theatre. Its set features projections that resemble comic strips, and the characters behave at moments like they are straight out of a superhero movie. Quan and Tong rap their songs, and Huong, a middle-aged woman, is cartoonishly firtatious. Other characters in the play include Hippie Dude, Redneck Biker, and Ninjas, and they act like the stereotypes their names signify. I am interested in examining the use of language and sound in the play. How the characters sound in speech and songs is key to understanding the play, and I argue that Nguyen’s unconventional use of language makes sense only in the context of the broader history of Asian American theatre. In Vietgone, Nguyen tells a superhero story about his parents, and that story can be told only by having his characters played by Asian American actors who can perform the sound and speech of Geek Theatre.

“Yo, What’s Up, White People?”: “Universal” English and American Gibberish Perhaps as a way to avoid the awkwardness of dramatizing his parents’ sex life, Nguyen includes a character named Playwright who introduces the play in the opening scene. The play begins with Playwright facing the audience and

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explaining what to expect. After the obligatory warnings about turning of cell phones and prohibiting recording devices, he tells the audience that “all characters appearing in this work are fctitious. Any resemblances to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”9 In the OSF production, the actor playing Playwright delivered the line in a comically ironic way, and the audience immediately understood that Nguyen, with a wink, wanted the audience to see (but not really see) the characters as based on real people in his lives. In the script, Playwright then announces that “this is a story about a completely made-up man named Quang.” The lights then come up on Quang, the male protagonist, as he says “S’up bitches” (10). Playwright follows Quang’s frst line with an introduction of Tong as “a completely not-real woman” (10). The frst line spoken by Tong is, “Whoa, there’s a lotta white people up in here.” Playwright then explains to the audience that Vietnamese characters will be speaking fuent English: “And though they are Vietnamese—born and raised there—for the purpose of this tale, it is to be noted that this will be their speaking syntax” (10). The three characters further demonstrate the linguistic rules of the play with an illustrative exchange. In the OSF production, Asian Girl and Asian Guy were played by Tong and Quang, respectively. TONG: Yo, what’s up, white people? QUANG: Any of you fy ladies want get up on my “Quang Wang”? PLAYWRIGHT: Which is the opposite of this one: ASIAN GIRL: Herro! Prease to meeting you! I so Asian! ASIAN GUY: Fly Lice! Fly Lice! Who rikey eating fy lice?

(10) The exaggerated contrast between the language spoken by stereotypical Asian characters and Nguyen’s Vietnamese characters signals to the audience that the world of the play demands a diferent kind of suspension disbelief. The audience, which Nguyen assumes to consist of “white people,” needs to discard their expectation of Asian characters speaking broken English and accept the world of Vietgone in which Vietnamese people who just arrived in Arkansas from Saigon can speak fuent English. The linguistic device that generated the most amount of laughter at the OSF production of Vietgone was the way American characters sounded. Playwright demonstrates how American characters speak with characters named “American Guy” and “American Girl.” In the OSF production, the characters were played by the same actors that portrayed Quang and Tong, respectively. PLAYWRIGHT: And on the occasion—when it occurs—that an American char-

acter should appear, they will sound something like this: AMERICAN GUY: Yee-haw! Get’er-done! Cheeseburger, wafe fries, cholesterol! PLAYWRIGHT: Spouting American nonsense which sounds very American but yet incredibly confusing to anyone not natively from here. AMERICAN GIRLS: NASCAR, botox, frickles! (10)

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By having American characters speak gibberish, Nguyen reverses the convention of American stage speech in which foreigners typically speak broken English or gibberish and Americans speak fuent English. In so doing, Nguyen signals to the audience that the play is to be seen as comical and a fun take on cultural encounters. As Charles Isherwood of The New York Times puts it in his review of the play, Vietgone is a “raucous comedy” that “gleefully reverses” stereotypes.10 With the stereotypes reversed, American characters are caricatured as stupid and comical for not speaking Vietnamese well, and they function as comic relief throughout the play. Vietgone is the latest play in a long list of Asian American plays with characters that speak English fuently onstage when, in fact, they are supposed to be speaking an Asian language in the world of the play. For example, Velina Hasu Houston’s Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken), like Vietgone, is about the playwrights’ parents and premiered at Manhattan Theater Club in 1987. Houston’s play is about her mother, a Japanese woman who married a half-Black and half-Native American GI during World War II. It opens with a monologue by a character named Setsuko Shimada, a twenty-year-old Japanese woman on an island in Japan in 1945. Wearing a torn kimono with her face smudged with dirt, she embodies the destruction her country endured at the end of World War II. Houston’s description of Setsuko is detailed and realistic, and if she did not say a word onstage, it would be assumed that she is a Japanese woman who does not speak fuent English. However, Setsuko opens the play with the following lines: “A beast wrestles with my soul. It comes at night, hiding in the crash of the midnight tide, arrogant and white, powerful and persistent. Who owns this creature?”11 (221). It is clear in the play that Setsuko is actually speaking Japanese, but the Asian American actress playing her says her lines in fuent English. The audience is asked to imagine Setsuko as an actual Japanese woman with the linguistic exception. This kind of linguistic exception is common in early Asian American plays, as exemplifed not only by Houston’s plays but also by those of Wakako Yamauchi, Momoko Iko, and Genny Lim. Of course, there are a number of practical reasons for having Asian characters speak fuent English onstage. For one, the vast majority of Asian American playwrights write in English, and most are not fuent in the language of their parents or grandparents. However, it is the explicit intention of Asian American playwrights to not use translation in their plays. The Asian American playwrights’ intended choice to have Asian characters speak fuent English onstage is rooted in the history of how Asian American theatre emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. First Asian American theatre companies such as the East West Players (founded in 1965 in Los Angeles) were formed to allow Asian American actors to portray non-stereotypical characters. Stereotypical roles in theatre, flm, and television at the time included coolies, laundromat owners, war victims, war brides, and many others that were marked as perpetual foreigners with exotic Asian accents, pidgin English, and gibberish. One of the main goals of the East West Players was to demonstrate the Americanness of Asian American actors by casting them in roles that did not require them to be

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marked as Asian. For early Asian American actors, the ability to do an Asian accent was an asset as well as a liability. Most did not speak an Asian language and frequently had to fake an accent to get an acting job, and their portrayal further propagated the stereotype of the Asian perpetual foreigner. In short, Asian American actors advocated for themselves so that they would not need to play roles that required an Asian accent. They wanted to speak fuent American English onstage and onscreen in order to be seen and included as American actors. Early Asian American actors and playwrights also faced the long-standing stereotype of Asian language being inherently comical. American popular culture is flled with jokes and comic bits about Asian languages and names sounding funny to the ears of those speaking English. From songs about “John Chinaman” to the Chinese foreign student named Long Duk Dong in the flm Sixteen Candles (1984), Asian languages or what sounded like them have been seen as comical. Krystyn Moon, in her study of Chinese topics in American popular music in the nineteenth century, notes that Chinese characters were depicted by using “Orientalized sounds,” and how Chinese people spoke English was a major comic device in popular theatre. Moreover, how Chinese characters sounded onstage was a way to distinguish them from American characters: “The most common device for distinguishing between Chinese and Americans on the stage was a combination of pidgin English and gibberish.”12 Given the troubled history of Asian accents in dramatic representation, it is not surprising that Asian American actors and playwrights wanted their characters to speak what can be described as an unmarked language. According to the linguists Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, unmarkedness refers to a type of language that is made powerful by being both normalized and naturalized. Markedness, on the other hand, is a “hierarchical structuring of diference” and “a process whereby some social categories gain a special, default status that contrasts with the identities of other groups, which are highly recognizable.”13 The unmarked language of Asian American theatre allowed the actors and playwrights to claim Americanness as a “special, default status.” However, as it is the case with any form of essentialized identity, unmarkedness is as problematic as markedness. If markedness assumes that Asian characters speak pidgin English, unmarkedness has the danger of erasing cultural diferences and privileging naturalized English as the universal language of American theatre. Moreover, as Josephine Lee observes, “even the universal language is ethnically marked.”14 Lee warns that assimilation was made impossible for many immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as for Native Americans, because of a racist legal and institutional history—including slavery, genocide, and exclusionary laws and policy—as well as because of individual acts of prejudice and ignorance.15 From the Chinese Exclusion Act of the nineteenth century to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Asian immigrants were prevented from inclusion into the American society. The stereotype of the perpetual foreigner

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with an accent was a cynical expression of such exclusion and what Karen Shimakawa calls “national abjection.”16 Early Asian American playwrights had to decide how they would portray Asian American characters who faced legal and cultural exclusion and abjection, and many had their immigrant characters speak the language they would never perfect. In their plays, the characters live unassimilable lives, but they speak the language of the assimilated.

“I’ll Make It Home”: Linguistic Attitude and the Insider Audience In writing Vietgone, Nguyen had to decide how his Vietnamese characters who could not speak English should sound onstage for the audience that did not speak Vietnamese. Like Velina Hasu Houston and Wakako Yamauchi, Nguyen has his characters speak fuent English, but unlike the earlier playwrights, he does not have them speak in unmarked or “universal” American English. As the opening scene of the play shows, Quang and Tong speak in a style that is marked by the infuences of comics, hip-hop, and other forms of popular culture. Bill Varble, in his review of the OSF production, notes that Quang and Tong sound like “American Millennials,” but it would be more accurate to say that the way they speak refects a combination of the infuences Nguyen experienced throughout his life.17 At times, the characters sound like comic superheroes, and at other times, they talk like downtown New Yorkers. And when they rap, they embody the hip-hop culture Nguyen participated in while growing up in a predominantly African American neighborhood in Arkansas. Moreover, Quang and Tong sound like characters in other plays Nguyen wrote in the style of Geek Theatre. In his review of Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters produced by Garage Rep at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chris Jones describes the play as “high-school speak” and “Dungeons & Dragons cool.”18 Although Jones does not elaborate on what he means by “high-school speak,” he implies that sounding (or trying to sound) cool is key to describing the type of speech used by Nguyen’s characters. Nguyen states in a video interview that he wrote the play for the “sixteen-year-old version” of himself and made the Vietnamese characters sound like how he speaks.19 Quang and Tong in Vietgone speak in ways that express their sense of self-importance as if they want to be seen as cool but they know deep inside that they are geeky, insecure, or traumatized. In other words, the actors have to perform their characters’ coolness in exaggerated and comical ways while ultimately undermining their efort by admitting to their weaknesses. For example, in Scene One of She Kills Monsters, the main character, Agnes meets Chuck, who is described as “a nerdy teen dressed like a Grunge Rocker roadie,” to learn about Dungeons and Dragons. Their exchange demonstrates how each character performs his or her version of coolness while also expressing their insecurities and trauma. AGNES: I’m Looking For Chuck Biggs? CHUCK: You’re Looking At Him! But My Hommies Just Call Me Simply Dm

Biggs Cause, You Know, I’m “Big” Where It Counts.

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AGNES: Uh… CHUCK: As in MY BRAIN! AGNES: (Relieved.) Oh!!! CHUCK: Not because I’m fat.

Seriously, it really has nothing to do with body mass index, I actually work out…or plan on working out— AGNES: I get it.20 Later in the scene, it is revealed that Agnes’s little sister had died, and she is seeking help from Chuck to better understand what happened to her. While the play is essentially about loss and grieving, the language used in the play is “highschool speak.” In Vietgone, most interactions between characters are written in a similar way, and language functions as a tragi-comedic device. After the introduction of Quang and Tong by Playwright in the opening scene, lights come up on Quang who is riding a motorcycle with his best friend Nhan. The two are taking a road trip from their refugee camp in Fort Chafee, Arkansas, to Camp Pendleton, California, because Quang is determined to return to Vietnam to be with his wife and kids. Nguyen’s stage direction reads, “Quang is rhyming to himself for fun as they blaze down the highway.” Quang raps the following lines “for fun” as Nhan becomes increasingly annoyed: QUANG. YELLA MUTHAFUCKAH ON A MOTORCYCLE RIDING SO FAST LIKE HE’S SUICIDAL DRIVING ’CROSS AMERICA TO CATCH A FLIGHT TO HIS HOME CITY SO HE CAN GO HOMICIDAL IN SAIGON CITY IN VIETNAM SHOT UP BY THE VIET CONG THEY STOLE MY PEEPS’ FREEDOM SO I’M COMING TO KILL THEM CALL ME THEIR ARCH-VILLAIN CAN’T STOP ME I’M WILLIN’ TO DIE FOR THIS VISION OF A VIETNAM THAT’S FREE FROM THOSE EVIL VC YOU CAN’T STOP ME I’M LIKE A PISSED OFF BRUCE LEE WITH A HI-YA, A KICK, AND KUNG FU GRIP WE’LL COME OUT SWINGING, WE DON’T GIVE NO SHITS

(11)

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The message of the rap is bitter and angry, but the way it was performed at the OSF production was indeed fun. The actor playing Quang was serious, but the set was bright and colorful. And the audience broke out in a loud laughter when Nhan, a comical character, interrupted Quang’s rapping with “Dude—[…] Will you PLEASE stop rhyming and driving at the same time? You’re going to get us killed!” (12). The predominantly Asian American audience at the OSF reacted enthusiastically to the scene not only because it featured an attractive and masculine Asian man and his sidekick, a pair rarely seen in American theatre, but, more likely, because of how they sounded. The language used in Vietgone is similar to how the character of Song sounds in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfy. Josephine Lee describes Song as speaking “slangy language” that is appealing to an “insider audience.” That language, according to Lee, can be seen as “answering directly some of the stereotypical assumptions about the Asian character.”21 In other words, Gallimard and the audience watching M. Butterfy may expect Song to speak like a stereotypical Asian female character type as either a Lotus Blossom or a Dragon Lady, but Song speaks like a southern Californian. Song’s speech may surprise most people but pleases the Asian American spectator who feels like an “insider audience.” Similarly, the predominantly Asian American audience at the OSF ConFest cheered the collective experience of being an “insider audience” watching onstage Asian characters that did not sound stereotypical. At the same time, the way Nguyen’s characters sounded may have also reminded the audience of earlier Asian American characters whose language is uniquely diferent from “universal” English or stereotypical speech. For instance, in Frank Chin’s 1972 play Chickencoop Chinaman, the protagonist Tam Lum says, “I talk the talk of orphans” in “motherless bloody tongue”: I am the natural born ragmouth speaking the motherless bloody tongue. No real language of my own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else’s trash that don’t conceive. But the sound truth is that I AM THE NOTORIOUS ONE AND ONLY CHICKENCOOP CHINAMAN HIMSELF that talks in the dark heavy Midnight, the secret Chinatown Buck Buck Bagaw.22 Born in the US, Tam did not learn the “maternal” language, Cantonese, and he refuses to speak the “good English” that he associates with white supremacy.23 Instead, he chooses to speak the language of “Chinaman sons of Chinamans, children of the dead.” Frank Chin elaborates in an interview that “For us American born, both the Asian language and the English language are foreign. We are a people without a native tongue. To whites, we’re all foreigners, still learning English.”24 To him, Chinese Americans do not have a language because they cannot speak the language of their ancestors, and to speak fuent English

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would signify a futile attempt at assimilation in the US that does not see Asians as American, no matter how many generations of their family have lived in the country. Daniel Y. Kim argues that Frank Chin’s use of language has “less to do with the idiom, grammar, and syntax of ‘street discourse’ than it does with the expression of a particular attitude toward language use itself—an appropriative, violent, and disfguring attitude.”25 In the absence of an Asian American vernacular, Frank Chin emphasizes the “aural and oral dimension” in his writing and creates what Kim describes as “the sound of a particular agency, one that is imagined as a racially authentic and that is propelled by a certain aggression.”26 The words spoken by Tam in Chickencoop Chinaman are not authentic Chinese American speech or an Asian American vernacular. Rather, they signify the anger toward racism and imitation of “a certain masterful, literary intent” in African American writers such as Ralph Ellison.27 Both Chickencoop Chinaman and Vietgone are infuenced by African American writings and speech, and both emphasize the performative dimension of language. The main characters speak in musical rhythm and project an attitude of exaggerated bravado in their speech. The actors must emphasize the performance of language and embody the characters’ anger and playfulness through sound and speech. The comparison between Frank Chin and Qui Nguyen helps to explain the unconventional language in their plays, but there is one critical diference between the two. Unlike Frank Chin, Qui Nguyen encourages actors to improvise. In his notes on music, Nguyen states, “The performance of these songs should be improvisational and performed in the actors’ own styles.”28 This means that actors can freestyle rap the songs. Improvisation further underscores the performative dimension of language and allows actors to interpret the songs for their audience. In Nguyen’s version of Geek Theatre, his Vietnamese characters are angry, vulnerable, and traumatized, but they are also cool and can express their feelings in freestyle rap. More importantly, the meaning of the play is generated in the performance of Nguyen’s words and songs by Asian American actors. In this sense, the OSF audience may have responded more enthusiastically to the performances of Asian American actors who were embodying the story of Nguyen’s parents and less to the Vietnamese characters. Indeed, watching talented Asian American actors rap can, in itself, be cathartic to the Asian American spectator. Although Nguyen wrote Vietgone before the musical Hamilton premiered, the comparison between the two works cannot be overlooked. In Hamilton, nonwhite actors perform white characters partly as a way to remark on the construction of whiteness in the founding of the US. Similarly, in Vietgone, Asian American actors perform Vietnamese characters to remark on how Vietnamese refugees have existed in the imagination of American nationhood since the fall of Saigon in 1975. In both works, rap is used as a theatrical device to establish the relationship between the actors and the characters. Instead of actors embodying and performing the characters, they sing and rap about what the characters think

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about and feel. In Vietgone, for instance, the song “I’ll Make it Home” expresses how the characters Quang and Tong negotiate their new lives as war refugees in Arkansas.29 To Quang, “I’ll make it home” describes his desperate desire to return to Vietnam even if it means risking his life. Tong, on the other hand, is willing to make the US her new home while acknowledging how difcult that may be. The song is about the conficting attitudes Quang and Tong have about their wish to return to Vietnam while knowing too well that they must make the US their home. But what makes the performance of the song by Asian American actors powerful are the parts that refer to what the characters have not yet experienced. Quang describes the US as “a country not known for love for peeps with a yellow face,” and Tong describes it as “a place where our kids will think of us with disgrace” (36). The songs in Vietgone, like Hamilton, are used to provide a historical hindsight of the characters and to explain their lives from the viewpoint of the actors performing them.

“You and I Speak the Same Language”: Asian American Superheroes and Geek Theatre As expected of a sex comedy, Vietgone ends with the lovers, Quang and Tong, getting together in the last scene. In his heartfelt confession, Quang tells Tong that he cares about her, and when she does not want to take it seriously, he explains what he means: “I just… You’re the only thing in this country—maybe even in this world—that even makes a lick of sense to me. You and I speak the same language” (90). Quang does not mean that they speak Vietnamese but that they “understand each other” (90). Like a handsome hero in a Hollywood classic, Quang kisses Tong, and their story comes to an end. It is an appropriate ending for the character of Quang who is portrayed by Nguyen as a superhero. Like other superheroes, he not only gets the girl at the end but fnds love after an adventure that leads to his self-discovery and fgurative death. During his motorcycle road trip with Nhan, Quang meets American hippies who teach them about marijuana and free love, and he fghts of Redneck Biker and Ninjas in what Nguyen describes as “the most badass martial arts fght ever to be seen on a theatrical stage” (74). Like Superman, Quang defeats Redneck Biker and Ninjas with punches and kicks that defy gravity. The adventure reaches its climax when Nhan fnally convinces Quang that they are nothing but ghosts to those who are in Vietnam and that they died when they arrived in the US. Nhan tells Quang, You’re dead. We all are. We died the moment the VC crossed Newport Bridge into Saigon and you few us the fuck outta there to save us. And that’s what you did, you saved a lot of lives that day, but there was one life that got lost and that was yours. Let Thu [Quang’s wife] and your kids mourn you. Let them say their goodbyes. (85)

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In that moment, Quang realizes that he died fguratively in Vietnam and that he can be reborn in the US. The character arc of Quang is unquestionably that of a superhero, but Nguyen complicates the superhero narrative by adding a scene he calls “Epilogue.” In the scene, it is the year 2015, and Quang is much older. He sits at a dinner table to be interviewed by Playwright about how he met Tong. Playwright tries to get his recording device to work while Quang drinks his beer. Most notably, the stage direction reads, “For the frst time in the play, Quang now speaks with a deep Vietnamese accent” (92). In the OSF production, the actor playing Quang transformed onstage from a movie-like superhero who just kissed the heroine to an older man wearing glasses and surrounded by beer cans. In the Epilogue, he is no longer the comic superhero version of the father imagined by the playwright, and he would rather sing country music (“Mama’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”) than freestyle rap. His broken English is close to what Nguyen’s actual father probably sounds like (92). He would rather talk about everything else but the Vietnam War because he does not think his life should be defned by the eight years he fought as a helicopter pilot. Playwright grows frustrated with Quang’s lack of interest in the interview but ends up provoking Quang by calling the war a “mistake” (96). Quang explains to Playwright that Vietnamese people do not want Vietnam to be remembered as a mistake and that to them, “the war was not political, it was real”: “We fght because it was only thing we could do. But we not choose to be in war. War came to us” (97). Quang’s explanation to his son, given with “a deep Vietnamese accent,” is the fnal message of Vietgone. Throughout the play, Nguyen portrays his father as a superhero who saves people’s lives with his helicopter, defeats racists with gravity-defying kung fu moves, and speaks and raps like the coolest man on earth, but in the Epilogue, Nguyen shows his father as an everyman who prefers to talk about memories of his son rather than the war. For both the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Manhattan Theatre Project, May Adrales directed the actor playing Quang to transform into an older man by wearing a pair of glasses and a cardigan. This onstage transformation echoed how Superman becomes Clark Kent by putting on nondescript clothes and a pair of glasses. With the ending, Nguyen signals to how he imagines his father as a superhero: he is to be portrayed by a charismatic and masculine Asian American actor who can speak, rap, love, and fght like a badass. The body of the Asian American actor, in this sense, functions as the superhero costume, and one of the superpowers the characters possess is the ability to sound like the playwright, a young Vietnamese American who grew up immersed in comic books and rap music. It was this version of the superhero that the audience at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival cheered, and when the superhero transformed into a mere mortal in the last scene, there was, in the audience, a collective recognition of the heroic power Asian American actors brought to their characters. And the source of that power came from how they sounded onstage.

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Notes 1 The play received the 2016 LA Drama Critics Circle Ted Schmitt Award and the 2016 ATCA/Steinberg Play Award. It was a fnalist for the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. 2 www.vampirecowboys.com/about.htm. The term “Geek Theatre” was coined by producer Abby Marcus who eventually married Nguyen. 3 Qui Nguyen, “About the Collaboration: Geeking Out Onstage,” in The Downtown Anthology: 6 Hit Plays from New York’s Downtown Theaters, eds. Morgan Gould and Erin Salvi (New York: Playscripts Inc., 2015), 309. 4 Jason Zinoman, “Identities as Elements to Play with and Juggle: The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G,” The New York Times, 3 April 2011. www.nytimes. com/2011/04/04/theater/reviews/agent-g-by-qui-nguyen-at-st-marks-churchreview.html. 5 Nguyen, “About the Collaboration,” 309. 6 Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone Begins Next Week at OSU,” Broadway World (Portland), 23 March 2016. www.broadwayworld.com/portland/article/Qui-NguyensVIETGONE-Begins-Next-Week-at-OSF-20160323. 7 Diep Tran, “How Mom and Dad Met, with Ninjas,” The New York Times, 5 October 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/theater/vietgone-qui-nguyen-manhattantheater-club.html. 8 Zinoman, “Identities as Elements to Play with and Juggle.” 9 Nguyen, Vietgone, 9. All subsequent references to the play are indicated with page numbers in parentheses. 10 Charles Isherwood, “Review: ‘Vietgone,’ a Refugee Tale with Laughs and Rap,” The New York Times, 25 October 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/theater/ vietgone-review.html. 11 Velina Hasu Houston, ed., The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 221. 12 Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 42. 13 Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Language and Identity,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 372. 14 Josephine Lee, “Between Immigration and Hyphenation: The Problems of Theorizing Asian American Theater.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism XIII, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 45–69, 61. 15 Lee, “Between Immigration and Hyphenation,” 49. 16 I am using Karen Shimakawa’s concept of “national abjection” as articulated in her book National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 17 Bill Varble, “Immigrant Story Told Nonlinearly in ‘Vietgone,’” Mail Tribune, 3 August 2016. http://mailtribune.com/news/top-stories/immigrant-story-told-nonlinearlyin-vietgone-. 18 Chris Jones, “She Kills Monsters Conjures D&D Cool,” Chicago Tribune, 3 March 2013. www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-xpm-2013-03-03-ct-ent-0304garage-rep-review-20130303-story.html. 19 “Playwright and Director Interview: Vietgone,” Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 13 October 2015. https://youtu.be/DD5FLBBqA2k. 20 Qui Nguyen, She Kills Monsters (New York: Samuel French, 2012), 8. 21 Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia, PA. Temple University Press, 1998), 107. 22 Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon: Two Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 7.

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23 In the play, Lone Ranger tells Tam: “But, say, ya speak good English, China Boy.” Chin, 38. Lee analyzes Tam’s speech in the framework of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in Chapter 3 of Performing Asian America. 24 Dorothy Ritsuko MacDonald, “Introduction,” in Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon, xviii. 25 Daniel Y. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 208. Emphasis original. 26 Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow, 216. 27 Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow, 216. 28 Nguyen, Vietgone, 7. 29 A short video version of the song created by Manhattan Theatre Club is available on YouTube. https://youtu.be/Lq8tOzDBJrU. The video features Raymond Lee as Quang and Jennifer Ikeda as Tong. The two actors were in the production produced by MTC in 2016.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abbey Theatre 86, 99, 101 ben Abdallah, Mohammed 127 Abdülaziz 108–109 Abdülmecid 107 absurdism 49 absurd jokes 49–50, 52–53, 59, 61–63 Act of Union (Ireland) 85 Adrales, May 193, 204 African National Congress (ANC) 68–70, 74–80 African personality 11, 118–121, 123, 125, 127, 129 Afro-modernity 17, 27n10 after empire (defnition) 1–4, 7, 10, 11, 13 Aggett, Neil 11, 68, 77 AIDS 75–76, 78–79 alienation 30, 31, 36, 40, 49, 55–56, 60, 123, 129, 163, 178 Alisjahbana, Sutan Takdir 138 Allende, Salvador 40 Altamirano, Guillermo 171–172 American Indian Dance Theatre 59 American Indian Theater Ensemble see Native American Theater Ensemble American Indian Movement (AIM) 62 Amin, Idi 9, 16, 17, 23–26 Amrohi, Kamal 184–185 AnGiall (Behan) 95 Antoine, André 110 apartheid 11, 15, 68–70, 75–77, 79–80; anti-apartheid 18, 69–70, 75–76, 80;

neo-apartheid 70; post-apartheid 10, 11, 68–70, 72, 74, 76–80 Art Cinema (European) see Second Cinema Arusha Declaration (1967) 24 Asa Ga Kimashita (Houston) 197 Asia-Pacifc War 149–150, 152 Atatürk, Kemal 109 Athanasiou, Athena 157 avantgarde 7, 49, 144 A Baby Stroller on the Over Bridge (Oh) 50, 55–56, 58–59, 62 Baiju Bawra 184 Bali, Margarita 163, 169 Beckett, Samuel 49, 60, 90 Begum, Iqbal 184 Behan, Brendan: biographical information 11, 87–88, 91, 99; connection to Ireland 89, 90; nationalism 89, 101; use of Irish language 89, 93; see also AnGiall; Borstal Boy; The Hostage; The Quare Fellow Behan, Kathleen 87 Behan, Stephen 87 Beijing National Academy of Arts 135–136 Beijing opera 12, 13, 134 Betsuyaku, Minoru 141 Bhabha, Homi 152 Bhangra 177, 183 Biko Foundation 70–71 Biko, Nkosinathi 71 Biko, Steve 68, 77, 79–80

208 Index

Biko:Where the Soul Resides (Koboekae) 10, 68, 71–74, 80 Black Consciousness Movement (South Africa) 71, 73–74, 80 Black Economic Empowerment Program (South Africa) 70 Blyden, Edward 118–120 Boal,Augusto and Boalian 33, 39–40 Body Indian (Geiogamah) 50, 59–60, 62 Bollywood 12, 177, 178–180, 182–183 Borstal Boy (Behan) 88, 92, 97, 99 Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame 124–125 Brecht, Bertolt and Brechtian 31, 33, 35, 37–41, 60, 95, 134, 140–141, 144, 166 Bridge, The (Leis) 40, 43 British Empire 5, 6, 8–9, 68, 85, 92, 95 Brook, Peter 77 Bungaku-za (Art Theatre) 139 Bush, George H.W. 43 Bux, Ali 184 Campesino 33 Canal Zone (Panama) 2, 10, 30, 33–36, 38–40, 43–44 Carter, Jimmy 34, 43 Catholic Church 39, 88 Center for Research on Social Actions (CIAS) see Panamanian Center for Research and Social Actions (CEASPA) Cesaire, Aime 31 Chemers, Michael 23 Chickencoop Chinaman (Chin) 201–202 Chin, Frank 201 Chong,Wishing 12, 149–150, 155, 159 Circle-in-the-Square 90 citizenship 4, 32, 149, 150–151, 153, 156–158, 185–186 Codina, Nora 171–72 Cold War 9, 12, 32–33, 40, 133, 162 Collins, Michael 87, 97, 98, 100 colonial logic 2, 31 coloniality of power 10, 31–33, 40, 42, 44 communist 9, 35, 79, 137, 139; anticommunist 39, 43, 139; communist movement 12 community theatre 36, 37, 123, 127 concert party 11, 126–127, 129 Connolly, James 87, 90, 98 Craig, Edward Gordon 136 cultural revolution(s) 12, 36 Cultural Revolution (China) 140–141, 144 CumannnamBan 87

Darülbedayi 110–111 Dattani, Mahesh 186 decolonial 2, 10, 15, 16, 30–31, 42, 68 Dei-Annang, Michael 122 Desai, Ashwin 70 desaparecidos 162, 164 Deutsch, Ana 169 Dhadda, Harvey 181 Dhalla, Ghalib Shiraz 187–188 Diamond, Elin 33 diaspora 3, 179, 182 dictatorship 9–10, 12, 16, 30, 35, 41, 44, 162, 166, 168, 171–173 District N 149, 152–155, 157, 159 diva 178–180, 182, 185–188, 190 diva worship 186–188 Dixit, Madhuri 180 docudrama 75–76 Dolmabahçe Palace Theatre 107 drag 177, 180–183, 186, 190 Dressing Room, The (Shimizu) 142 Drug War 43 Dussel, Enrique 32–33 East African interregnum 17, 18, 26 East is East (Khan-Din) 187, 190 East West Players 197 Easter Rising (Ireland) 87, 96 Edufa (Sutherland) 11, 122–123 efgy 33 Elder Madhavrao Peshwa, The 134 embodied historiography 10, 69, 74 Ertuğrul, Muhsin 111 exile(s) 162–173 Experimental Theatre of Cali (Colombia) 33 Experimental Theatre Players (Ghana) 122 Expo ‘70 148–151, 154–157, 159 Fanon, Franz 31, 36, 100–111 fascism 15 Fatherland or Silistria (Kemal) 107 Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (Brecht) 35 “feeling brown” 13, 177, 179 feminist theatre 33 Fianna Éireann 88 Fianna Fáil 88 Five-Year Economic Development Plans (Korea) 57 Floods, The (Ruganda) 17, 24 folk performance 10, 134, 136–137, 140, 142 folk tradition 13, 36 Foriwa (Sutherland) 11, 122–123

Index 209

Free of Fear (Leis) 43 Free Theatre (Japan) 134, 141 Freedom Charter (African National Congress) 70 French Empire 6 Gaelic League 86, 101 Gaelic revival 86, 93–94 Game of Silence (Imbuga) 16, 22 Gao, Xingjian 133–144 Gardel, Carlos 162–163, 166, 168, 171 Gedikpaşa Theatre 106–108 Geek Theatre 193, 195, 199, 202–203 Geiogamah, Hanay 10, 50, 59–63 Genet, Jean 49, 60, 90 Geneva Grand Theatre Ballet 167, 169 Getino, Octavio 165 Ghana Brigade Drama Group 126 Ghana Drama Studio 122 gibberish 13, 195, 197–198 Global South 3, 15, 48n65, 163, 166, 170 Gordimer, Nadine 15, 17 Grahamstown Arts Festival 73 Gramsci,Antonio 15, 16, 23 van Graan, Michael 68–70, 76 Gregory,Augusta (Lady) 86 Grotowski, Jerzy 77, 134, 140 Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) 70 Guide to a Popular Theatre (Leis) 36, 38 Güntekin, Reşat Nuri 110 Halm, Ben 124–125 Hamilton (Miranda) 1, 202–203 Here Comes the Sun with His War-Hat On (Leis) 40 Herrera, Omar Torrijos 30, 34 hip hop 13, 182, 193–194, 199 Hirata, Oriza 149 HIV/AIDS see AIDS Holding Talks (Rotimi) 50–51, 54–55, 62 homeland 3, 158, 179 Hospital, The (Nazareth) 16, 20–22 Hostage, The (Behan) 11, 85, 89, 95–96, 98–101 Hotte, Manon 167 Hour of the Furnaces, The (Solanas) 165 Houston,Velina Hasu 197, 199 huaju (spoken drama) 12, 134–137, 140–141, 144–145 Huang, Zuolin 140–141, 144 Hussein, Ebrahim 10, 16, 22–26 hybrid performance 13, 140 Hyde, Douglas 86, 90

Ibsen, Henrik 134, 135, 136 Imbuga, Francis 10, 16, 17, 22–23, 25–26 imperialism 4, 13; in Africa 2, 16, 26, 79, 125; British imperialism 92, 93, 118; cultural imperialism 12–13, 36, 119, 163, 166–167, 172–173; defnition of 14n11, 45n3; European imperialism 8; Japanese imperialism 2; in Latin America 33, 35, 43; US imperialism 30, 35, 40 Indian People’s Theatre Association 137 indigenous: aesthetics 50–51, 59, 63;African culture 125;African cultural institutions 119–120;African theatre 127; cultural practices 122; defnition of 64n6; elite 125; heritage 121; oral stories 109; people 3, 9, 35–37, 42–43, 50, 53, 55; performance 12, 51, 55, 133–136, 138–140; rights 35, 40; studies 3; theatre 141–142, 144; values 123; ways of life 33, 36 Institute of African Studies 123, 127 Interim Committee for an Arts Council 121 Interregnum 10, 15, 16–19, 22–26 Ionesco, Eugene 49, 55, 56 Irish Citizen Army 87 (Irish) Civil War 87–88, 90, 96–98, 100 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 87–88, 95–99 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) 87 Iron Curtain 4 Jantjie, Thamsanqa 78 Jatra 13, 137 Jeyifo, Biodun 15, 17 Jiao, Juyin 140 Jingju 134, 137, 140, 144 Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop see Theatre Workshop (Joan Littlewood) Journey to Salvation and Other Countries (Leis) 38–39 Jūrō, Kara 141 Kabuki 13, 134, 142 Kampala National Theatre 20 Kani, John 69 karagöz (shadow theatre) 11, 13, 104–106, 112 Karanth, B.V. 142 Karnad, Girish 142–143 Kasaba, Reşat 109 Kearney, Peadar 88 Kemal, Namik 11, 105–109 Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) 17–20

210

Index

Kenyatta, Jomo 16, 18, 24, 25 Kenyatta, Uhuru 25 Keyder, Cağlar 109 Khan-Din, Ayub 187 Khumalo, Duma 75–76 Kiango, S.D. 23 Kishida, Kunio 139 kkokdugaksi noreum (Korean traditional puppetry) 55 Koboekae, Martin 69–74 Kodzidan (House of Stories) 123 Kola, Kholofelo 75 Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) 56, 58 Kumar, Pravesh 177, 180, 183 Kumari, Meena: biographical information 184–185; dancer 178, 185, 187; ghost 179, 180, 184, 189; Hindi flm icon 177, 180; queer cultural icon 186; tragedienne 178, 185; see also Pakeezah Kuzwayo, Fezekile Ntsukela 78 Leis, Raúl 10, 30, 43; biographical information 35–36; Guide to Popular Theatre 36–37; see also Here Comes the Sun with His War-Hat On; Journey to Salvation and Other Countries; María Picana; Munduncíon, or the Arsonist’s Curse Little Theatre Movement 141–142, 144 Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, The (Mugo) 18, 20 Malay opera 134 Makerere Travelling Theatre 22 Mandela, Nelson 18, 69, 70, 77–79 Mantolo:The Tenth Step (Sekhabi) 68, 74–76, 80 Mao, Zedong 3, 137 María Picana (Leis) 41, 43 Marxist anti-colonialism 31 Marxist revolution 16 Mashetani (Hussein) 16, 22–23 Masuku, Subusio 68, 74–76, 80 Mau Mau see Kenya Land and Freedom Army Mbeki,Thabo 70, 76–77 meddah (storytelling) 104–106 Mei, Lanfang 141, 144 military dictatorship 162, 166, 168, 173 military occupation 10, 35 minor transnationalism 10, 50, 64 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 1 Miró Prize 38, 43

Mishima,Yukio 139 Miss Meena and the Masala Queens (Virdi) 177, 180–184 Moi, Daniel arap 16–18 Movimiento Papa Egoro (MPE) (Panama) 30 Mtwa, Percy 77 Mũgo, Micere 16–18 Munduncíon, or the Arsonist’s Curse (Leis) 40–43 Muñoz, José Esteban 179 Museveni,Yoweri 25 national abjection 199 National Academy of the Performing Arts (India) 140 National Arts Festival (South Africa) see Grahamstown Arts Festival National Asian American Theater Conference 193 National Party (South Africa) 70, 75, 81n2 National Theatre Movement (China) 135–136 National Theatre Movement of Ghana 11, 118, 122, 130 Native American Theatre Ensemble 59 Naum Theatre (Turkey) 107 Navajo-Land Outdoor Theatre 59 Nazareth, Peter 10, 16, 20–21, 26 Neocolonialism 31–33, 35, 43 New Cultural Movement (China) 135, 145 New National Theater (Japan) 149 New Theatre (Argentina) 33 NgaoyaJadi (Hussein) 16, 23–24 Ngema, Mbongeni 77 Nguyen, Qui 193, 202 Ninagawa, Kunio 141 Nkrumah, Kwame 11, 118, 124, 127; see also National Theatre Movement of Ghana; neocolonialism noh 142 Noriega, Manuel 9, 30, 35, 44n2 Northern Ireland 86–87, 95, 97 Nucleodanza 163, 169, 170–171, 176n31 Nuñez, Rafael 41 Nyerere, Julius 22 Obote, Milton 16, 25, 26n3, 29n51 O’Casey, Sean 90, 92, 100 Ode to Lata (Dhalla) 187, 190 Oh,Taesuk 10, 50, 55, 62 Okamoto, Tarō 156 Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool (Dei-Annang) 11, 122, 125

Index 211

Olaniyan,Tejumola 17, 26 On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (Dattani) 186 Oregon Shakespeare Festival 193, 204 ortaoyunu 11, 105–106 Osaka Expo see Expo 1970 Osanai, Kaoru 134, 136 Ottoman Empire 3, 8, 103–104, 106–109, 113–114 Ouyang,Yuquian 140 Pakeezah 177 Panamanian Center for Research and Social Actions (CEASPA) 35 Panikkar, Kavalam Narayana 143 Park, Chung Hee 56–57 Parker, Robert Ross 193 Paşa, Ali 108 Paşa, Fuad 108 Pearse, Patrick 87, 98 pentagonism 10, 35–36 People’s Houses (Turkey) 111–112 Pike Theatre 90, 93 Pirandello, Luigi 60 Piscator, Erwin 41 political economy of passion 163, 169, 173 Pooe, Jerry 71 Poor Theatre 77 postcolonialism 2–4, 7, 17, 26 Prebisch, Raul 31, 45n8 Prestán, Pedro 41–42 puppet theatre 2, 11, 36, 38, 194, 143 Quare Fellow,The (Behan) 11, 90–95, 100 queer nightlife 180–181 Quijano, Anibel 32 Rawlings, Jerry John 127–128 realism 63, 134–135, 138–139, 141, 183 The Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) (South Africa) 70 Red Earth Performing Arts Company 59 refugee 2, 13, 194, 200 Rendra,W.S. 138, 194, 200 Republican Peoples Party (Turkey) 111 Return of the Ancestors (Graan) 22, 68, 76–77, 79–80 Rifco Arts 177, 181, 183–184 rioplatense 163, 165, 170–171 Roach, Joseph 32 Robben Island 45n3, 79 Romero, Raúl Leis see Leis, Raúl Rotimi, Ola 10, 50–51, 53–56, 62–63

Roy,Vedi 181 Ruganda, John 10, 16–17, 24–26 Russian Empire 8 Sachs, Albie 69 Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam 184 Sainete 166, 169, 173 Sangeetnatak 12, 134 Sangeet Natak Akademi see National Academy of the Performing Arts (India) San Martín, José de 162 Satoh, Makoto 141 School of the Americas 35, 40 School of Music and Drama,The (Ghana) 123 Seagull, The (Chekhov) 142, 145 Second Cinema 165 Sekhabi,Aubrey 10, 68–70, 74–76, 80 Sengo, T.S.Y. 23 Seoul Shimin (Hirata) 149 Serumaga, Robert 10, 16–17 Shapiro, Jonathan see Zapiro Shimizu, Kunio 141–142 Shimkawa, Karen 12, 152–153, 199 shingeki (modern theatre) 134, 139, 141 shinpa (new drama) 134 Simpson, Alan 90 Sociodrama 10, 36–37 Solanas, Fernando 165–166, 172 Soldier’s Song (Kearney) 88 South (Solanas) 165 South African Students’ Organization 68, 71, 73–74 Spear of the Nation (Umkhonto we Sizwe) 75 Spiderwoman Theatre 59 Sridevi 180, 182 Stanislavski, Constantin 6, 37, 137 Steve Biko Foundation see Biko Foundation Struggle of the Naga People, The (Rendra) 143 Successor, The (Imbuga) 10, 17, 25 Sutherland, Efua T. 122–123, 126–127, 129 Suzuki Company of Toga 141 Suzuki, Tadashi 141 Swift, Carolyn 90 Takahashi,Yasunari 141–142 Tambutti, Susan 163, 169, 172 Tango 163, 165, 167–169, 170 Tango: El exilio de Gardel 12, 162–164, 167–169, 173

212 Index

Tanguedia 12, 163, 166–168 Tanzimat period 11, 103, 106–107 Taylor, Diana 32 Terayama, Shūji 141 teater moderen 12, 134 Teatro Nuevo see New Theatre Theatre of the Absurd 49, 51, 53 theatre for social change 10, 31, 33, 36 Theatre of Roots 140, 142–143 Theatre Workshop (Joan Littlewood) 90, 95–96 wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 17 Thindisa, Tipo 76 Third Cinema 165 Thomas, Robert 167 Trial of Dedan Kimathi, The (Ngugi) 17 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 69 Tshabalala-Msimang, Manto 72, 76 Tsukiji Little Theatre 136 Turkish Republic 109, 115 Uhuru (freedom) 2, 10, 16, 18–20, 23, 25 United Irishmen rising 85–86 University of Ghana 123 Ünlü,Aslihan 103, 115 USSR 6 de Valera, Eamon 87–89, 98, 100 Vampire Cowboys 193, 194 Virdi, Harvey 177, 180ç Vietgone (Nguyen) 193–194, 196, 200, 203 Vietnam War 9, 13, 40

Voluntary Theatre for Social Change (TEVOCASO) 36 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 52, 54–55, 60, 61 War of Independence (Ireland) 87, 96, 97 War of Independence (Turkey) 109 wayangkulit (puppet theatre) 143 Wakako,Yamauchi 197, 199 Weiss, Peter 41, 60 Wen,Yiduo 135 wenmingxi (civilized drama) 134, 140, 145 Windybrow Theatre 71 Winslow, Miriam 170 World War I 87 World War II 2, 9, 33, 49, 87, 197–198 Wound in the Heart, The (Ngugi) 16, 20 Woza Albert! (Mtwa/Negma/Simon) 76, 77, 79–80 Yakiniku Dragon (Chong) 148, 150, 153–154, 158 Yeats,W.B. 86, 93, 94, 100 Yirenkyi, Asiedu 123–128 Young Ottomans 108, 109 Yu, Shangyuan 135, 141 Yuyachkani (Peru) 33, 41 Zainichi 12, 148–150 Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) 78 Zhao, Taimou 135–136 Žižek, Slovoj 16, 23 Zubairi, Jamie 181 Zuma, Jacob 70, 78–80