Postcolonial Theatre: Tragedy and Triumph

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course takes a historically centered look at the use of theatre in the Anglophone postcolonies. We will start by exploring the role of theatre in colonialism—how it was deployed to both Europeanize the colonized subject and simultaneously to enforce ideas of cultural superiority. The rest of the course will analyze how colonized subjects use theatre to write back to empire, write around empire, or write through it. In order to do this, we will study indigenous forms of theatre and performance to best understand how theatre becomes a site for contesting colonial legacies through strategic mixes of European and traditional theatre practices. This course will begin by looking at the emerging Irish theatre as it was reacting to anti-colonial nationalism before moving on to similar movements in Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean.