Diaspora and Theatre

This course deals with the drama and theatre of African, Caribbean, and Asian immigrant communities in three Western locations: Britain, the United States, and Canada. Since the mid-twentieth century, the experience of migrancy has emerged as a globally significant subject in literary writing, but among immigrant cultural forms, drama and theatre lag well behind print genres such as fiction, poetry, non-fiction, criticism, and even a mass cultural medium like film. Drama succeeds as a diasporic form only when the author has fully embraced life in the diaspora, and the performance of drama on stage requires material and human resources, institutional structures, patronage, and live audiences on a scale altogether different from self-sufficient forms like novels and poems. The emergence of original and self-sustaining theatre in the diaspora is therefore a slow and difficult process that this course will trace at the levels of form, language, content, dissemination, and reception. We will focus on the generative conditions of dramatic writing as well as theatrical performance in the three Western locations, and attempt to relate the diasporic formations to “mainstream” theatre activities in meaningful ways.

Required Texts

Mustapha Matura, As Time Goes By (Britain, 1971)

Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit (USA, 1978)

Hanif Kureishi, Borderline (Britain,1981)

David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (USA, 1988)

Cherrie Moraga, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (USA, 1995)

Rahul Varma,No Man’s Land (Canada, 1998)

Kwame Kwei-Armah, Elmina’s Kitchen (Britain, 2003)

Lorena Gale, Angelique (Canada, 2003)

Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced (USA, 2013)

If you have questions about the course, please contact Professor Dharwadker at adharwaker@wisc.edu.