Editorial Comment: Resisting Theatre

Abstract

According to Yeboah, the design for the building went through three different phases: 1) an independence-era design for a space that was never built, based on performance traditions of the seven different regions of Ghana, to be funded by the British;2) a post-independence national theatre school, also rooted in Indigenous architecture, funded by the United States and razed in 1990;and 3) the present building, designed by Cheng Taining and funded by the Chinese government. Gunn interrogates the use of color-blind (as opposed to color-conscious) casting, and how race operates as part of the mise en scene of both productions. [...]the issue returns again to the practice of minstrelsy, this time in one of its exported manifestations in the form of Josephine Gassman’s “pickaninny chorus” in Alison Walls’s essay, “Josephine Gassman and Her ‘New Zealand Pickaninnies’: Performing the Colonial Family.”