Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter, eds. Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama

Abstract

MARC MAUFORT and CAROLINE DE WAGTER, eds. Signatures of the Past; Cultural Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wein: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2008. 314 pp. Originating a conference at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles 2007, this inclusive collection of critical essays on postmodern and postcolonial Canadian and American drama English provides a detailed consideration of In his Introduction, Marc Maufort acknowledges both the genetic and generic affinity between the dramatic production of the two countries (11) and the and divergence respect to identities, exilic predicaments, and multi-ethnic subject positions (11-12), leaving the field wide open for the following twenty essays. Although he offers the proviso the notion of 'cultural memory' is not only an attribute of ethnic difference (14), most of the essays focus on minority cultures both countries, placed opposition to an assumed homogenous white majority In this collection, the recurrent motif of interculturalism is positioned both positively and negatively: the Canadian essays construct intercultural ism as conciliatory, whereas the Latina (American) essays view it as a form of cultural genocide. Only a few of the essays undertake useful cross-border comparisons which identify and similarity terms of cultural memory. Craig Walker's opening piece, 'Hopeful Memories and Doomed Freaks.' Evolutionary Overtones Canadian and American Drama, draws on the environics research of Michael Adams Fire and Ice (2003) to launch a provocative analysis of four Canadian performances which embody patterns of hope and fulfillment, and six American plays which enact harsher Darwinian principles with respect to survival terms of their monstrous protagonists. Other critical border crossings, however, occlude historical differences, as is the case Jacqueline Petropoulos's 'The Ground on Which I Stand'. Rewriting History, African Canadian Style, which interprets Djanet Sears's Adventures of a Black Girl Search of God and Harlem Duet terms of drawing on African American culture as part of the larger project of rewriting and reclaiming blackness an African Canadian and diasporic context (80). Harry f. Elam's Remembering Africa, Cultural Memory more convincingly places Djanet Sears an American context, a comparison with Lorraine Hansberry and Suzan-Lori Parks, implicitly demonstrating Sears's acknowledged debt to Hansberry. Although these acclaimed women playwrights (32) differ many respects, their plays position cultural memory in service of identity construction and racial repositioning the present (32). His essay, like many the collection, is informed by Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire and Paul Connerton's How Societies Remember, which insist on the performativity of cultural memory. Ric Knowles elaborates on Taylor's thesis Performing Intercultural the Diasporic Present. The Case of Toronto. He begins with the questionable categorical assertion that [a]ll memory bridges difference (49), and then clearly establishes his terminology, distinguishing interculturalism from Canada's much vaunted policy of multiculturalism, which he believes commodif[ies] or exoticiz[es] difference (49) and which constructs memory as nostalgic. He effectively mines Toronto's complex intercultural performance ecologies(49) for his diverse case studies, which move from the individual effort to suture a divided cultural identity to the communal building of shared cultural memory, to the actual constitution of new forms of community through prosthetic' memory-making (52): Fish Eyes by South Asian Canadian Anita Majumbar, Singkil by Filipina Canadian Catherine Hernandez, The Sheep and the Whale by Moroccan Canadian Ahmed Ghazali, and The Scrubbing Project by the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. …