Staging Creolization

Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean

Emily Sahakian

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940090
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, 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 late-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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Unsettling the Gendered Stereotypes of Plantation Culture: Ina Césaire’s Rosanie Soleil and Maryse Condé’s Pension les Alizés
• 2 Remixing Unity and Difference: Maryse Condé’s An tan revolisyon, Ina Césaire’s Mémoires d’Isles, and Gerty Dambury’s Lettres indiennes
• 3 Syncretizing Performance and Moral Codes: Ina Césaire’s L’Enfant des passages and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ton beau capitaine
• 4 Diaspora Performances at Ubu Repertory Theater in New York
• 5 Recasting the Francophone Caribbean Couple at Ubu Repertory Theater
• Coda: Creolizing Knowledge in U.S. University Performances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index