Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama: Community, Kinship, and Citizenship / Edition 1

by Kanika Batra

Overview

In this timely study, Batra examines contemporary drama from India, Jamaica, and Nigeria in conjunction with feminist and incipient queer movements in these countries. Postcolonial drama, Batra contends, furthers the struggle for gender justice in both these movements by contesting the idea of the heterosexual, middle class, wage-earning male as the model citizen and by suggesting alternative conceptions of citizenship premised on working-class sexual identities. Further, Batra considers the possibility of Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian drama generating a discourse on a rights-bearing conception of citizenship that derives from representations of non-biological, non-generational forms of kinship. Her study is one of the first to examine the ways in which postcolonial dramatists are creating the possibility of a dialogue between cultural activism, women’s movements, and an emerging discourse on queer sexualities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415875912
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/07/2010
Series:	Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies , #17
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kanika Batra is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Texas Tech University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Permissions xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Feminist Visions and Queer Futures 1

Part I Jamaica

1 Making Citizens: Community, Kinship, and the National Imaginary in Dennis Scott's An Echo in the Bone (1974) and Dog (1978) 29

2 "We Shouldn't Shame to Talk": Postcolonial Sexual Citizenship in Sistren Theatre Collective's Bellywoman Banagarang and QPH 47

Part II India

3 A People's Theatre from Delhi in Alliance with the Women's Movement 69

4 Queering the Subaltern: Postcolonial Performativity in Mahesh Dattani's Seven Steps around the Fire and Mahasweta Devi and Usha Ganguli's Rudali 92

Part III Nigeria

5 Resistant Citizenship: Reading Feminist Praxis and Democratic Renewal in Nigeria through Femi Osofisan's Morountodun 113

6 "Daughters Who Know the Languages of Power:" Community, Sexuality, and Postcolonial Development in Tess Onwueme's Tell It to Women 130

Epilogue 146

Notes 151

Bibliography 163

Index 175