| My thesis explores the production and critical reception of two contemporary feminist plays, Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. In their various ways, both plays appropriate and attempt to revise British colonial history. I examine how these appropriations are at once subversive and reactionary. I am interested in the ways in which discourses of gender and sexuality on the one hand, and discourses of race and post-coloniality on the other, intersect and appear to undermine each other in these two plays. I am also concerned with the ways in which these purportedly feminist creative--and critical--projects, constructed from unacknowledged racial and colonial privilege, have offered certain oppressed gender and sexual identities the prospect of empowering representation, and simultaneously consigned oppressed racial and colonial identities to further subjection and invisibility. In this regard, I attempt to trace the implication of Western feminist thought and practice in the contemporary exercise of global power. I am interested in the parallels between contemporary processes of knowledge production and circulation that are buttressed by a system of global capitalism dominated by the West, and the historical processes of knowledge production and circulation that were buttressed by European colonial expansion. My study also attempts to trace the ambivalent and contradictory results of the contestation of oppressive power in both plays to the illusion of mutual exclusiveness between colonial institutions and phallocratic/heterosexist institutions as dramatized by the two playwrights and reproduced by their critics. |
