Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:13:57.557Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Postcolonial issues in performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

C. L. Innes
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
Get access

Summary

Drama has played a crucial part in the development of national cultures and audiences, and yet has received relatively little attention in postcolonial literary studies. This is all the more surprising given that dramatic performance raises so many issues that are central to postcolonial cultures – questions of identity, language, myth and history; issues regarding translatability, voice and audience; problems relating to production, infrastructures and censorship. In The Wretched of the Earth (1965), it is drama rather than poetry or the novel that Frantz Fanon advocates as the best means of raising the consciousness of people involved in an anticolonial struggle. In cultures where literacy has been confined mainly to a small elite group, and where there is a continuing oral culture with roots in precolonial traditions, drama and performance provide a means of reaching a much wider indigenous audience and tapping into forms and conventions which are already familiar to them. As W. B. Yeats wrote in retrospect in his Autobiographies (1926), ‘the great mass of our people, accustomed to interminable rhetorical speeches, read little, and so from the very start we felt that we must have a theatre of our own’.

Thus Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn set out in 1897 to create an Irish Literary Theatre (using the term ‘literary’ to emphasize that it would not cater to purely commercial interests). They stated their aims thus:

We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.[…]

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Postcolonial issues in performance
  • C. L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611339.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Postcolonial issues in performance
  • C. L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611339.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Postcolonial issues in performance
  • C. L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611339.003
Available formats
×