Staging Creolization: Women'S Theater And Performance From The French Caribbean (New World Studies)

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina CEsaire, Maryse CondE, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these latae-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization--the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women's plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.

• | Author: Emily Sahakian
• | Publisher: University Of Virginia Press
• | Publication Date: Jul 20, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 296 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Drama
• | ISBN-10: 0813940079
• | ISBN-13: 9780813940076