Can I Get a Witness? Performing Community in African-Nova Scotian Theatre

Abstract

In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha reminds us of the extent to which ambivalence “haunts the idea of the nation,” fracturing efforts to imagine unity and coherence, so that narratives of nation remain partial and incomplete (1). Alan Filewod echoes and extends this idea in his claim that “Canadian theatre can as a whole be considered as a meta-performance that enacts crises of nationhood” (xvii). If those crises of nationhood may be understood to include the place of racialized and sexualized “others” in the nation and the place of the “regional” within an imagined national culture, then African-Nova Scotian theatre enacts the ambivalence, the crises of nation(hood) of which Bhabha and Filewod speak. In fact, many African-Nova Scotian plays intervene in what Bhabha terms “those justifications of modernity — progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past — that rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic prerogative” (4). In part, this intervention is made through an abiding concern with history in the work of playwrights as diverse as George Elliott Clarke, George Boyd, Walter Borden, DavidWoods, Louise Delisle and Lucky Campbell, who cover the spectrum from professional theatre to the grassroots. But whether the play has a historical or contemporary focus, the interventions these plays make in the ways Canada is imagined are enabled by a performative structure of witnessing that forges a politically alternative community at the scene of the performance.