Courses

This seminar explores a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century dramas from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and North America as well as their diverse diaspora cultures. We investigate how theater artists have worked to dismatle imperial structures and to make sense of the social and material conditions that persist in the wake of colonial violence. Reading internationally renowned playwrights such as Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and Cherrie Moraga as well as emerging contemporary dramatists, we consider how these playwrights have enagaged with the cultures, economies, and ecologies of imperialism. In the process, we discover how dramatic literature invents new vocabularies for describing and theorizing diaspora, migration, and transcultural exchange. Drawing upon criticial approaches from theater and performances studies as well as postcolonial theory, we ask how dramatists receive and reinterpret a model of the global Anglophone world. We also track how theories of global Anglophone literature are themselves entagled with the language and practice of performace.