Remaking Pacific Pasts History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Theater from Oceania
Remaking Pacific Pasts: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Theater from Oceania

Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms-including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song-scripted drama is a relatively recent phe...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Looser, Diana (VerfasserIn)
Format: Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Honolulu University of Hawaii Press [2014]
Schriftenreihe:Pacific Islands Monographs Series
Schlagworte:
HISTORY / Australia & New Zealand
Historical drama, Pacific Island > History and criticism
Pacific Island drama (English) > History and criticism
Pacific Island drama (French) > History and criticism
Theater > Oceania
Online-Zugang:DE-1043
DE-1046
DE-858
DE-859
DE-860
DE-739
DE-473
URL des Erstveröffentlichers
Zusammenfassung:Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms-including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song-scripted drama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging during a period of region-wide decolonization and indigenous self-determination movements, most of these plays reassert Pacific cultural perspectives and performance techniques in ways that employ, adapt, and challenge the conventions and representations of Western theater. Drawing together discussions in theater and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies, Remaking Pacific Pasts offers the first full-length comparative study of this dynamic and expanding body of work.
It introduces readers to the field with an overview of significant works produced throughout the region over the past fifty years, including plays in English and in French, as well as in local vernaculars and lingua francas. The discussion traces the circumstances that have given rise to a particular modern dramatic tradition in each site and also charts routes of theatrical circulation and shared artistic influences that have woven connections beyond national borders. This broad survey contextualizes the more detailed case studies that follow, which focus on how Pacific dramatists, actors, and directors have used theatrical performance to critically engage the Pacific's colonial and postcolonial histories.
Chapters provide close readings of selected plays from Hawai'i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia/Kanaky, and Fiji that treat events, figures, and legacies of the region's turbulent past: Captain Cook's encounters, the New Zealand Wars, missionary contact, the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the Fiji coups. The book explores how, in their remembering and retelling of these pasts, theater artists have interrogated and revised repressive and marginalizing models of historical understanding developed through Western colonialism or exclusionary indigenous nationalisms, and have opened up new spaces for alternative historical narratives and ways of knowing. In so doing, these works address key issues of identity, genealogy, representation, political parity, and social unity, encouraging their audiences to consider new possibilities for present and future action.
Beschreibung:Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2021)
Beschreibung:1 online resource (328 pages) 19 illustrations
ISBN:9780824847753
DOI:10.1515/9780824847753

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