Cultural Crisis in Postcolonial Pacific Theatre: John Kneubuhl's Mele Kanikau: A Pageant

Abstract

Afakasi (half-caste) American Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl (1920–1992) had a profound influence on Polynesian theatre throughout the Pacific. In his trilogy of plays, Think of a Garden, Mele Kanikau: A Pageant, and A Play: A Play, he presents cultures in crisis, at risk not only because of the ongoing and enormous impact of colonization, but also because of new dangers in the form of global commodification, the burgeoning demands of tourism, and the more critical, and much more subtle, threat from within: Polynesian people themselves. As a polycultural, pan-Pacific dramatist, in his work Kneubuhl engages with postcolonial discourses, power structures, and social and cultural hierarchies. A playwright also concerned with authenticity, Kneubuhl writes from both inside and outside these contesting dialectics of power and his unique dramatic voice fuses the best of modernist Western drama with the ancient Samoan performance tradition of Fale Aitu.