Staging Creolization - Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean

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.

About the author

Emily Sahakian is Associate Professor of Theater and French at the University of Georgia.

Product details

• Authors: Emily Sahakian
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.06.2017
• EAN: 9780813940083
• ISBN: 978-0-8139-4008-3
• No. of pages: 312
• Series: New World Studies (Paperback); New World Studies
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Romance linguistics / literary studies