Maureen Moynagh, ed. African-Canadian Theatre

Abstract

MAUREEN MOYNAGH, ed. African-Canadian Theatre. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 2. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. xxii + 130pp. SUSAN BENNETT, ed. Feminist Theatre and Performance. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 4. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. xvii + 161pp. Certainly one of the challenges of creating an ambitious and necessary series like Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English would be to determine the title of each volume and thus the ways in which readers are encouraged to engage with and draw connections to the material. Maureen Moynagh's and Susan Bennett's edited volumes provide important insights into three critical areas of inquiry in Canadian theatre and performance studies: AfricanCanadian theatre, feminist theatre, and feminist performance. When read together, Moynagh's and Bennett's volumes are also rife with intriguing points of intersection that problematize, in refreshing ways, the parameters set by their respective volume titles. AfricanCanadian Theatre and Feminist Theatre and Performance both include analyses of the implications for scholars, critics, and artists who, among other commonalities, work in historically under-examined fields of inquiry and stage subjects and subject matters that affirm and destabilize dominant notions of the Canadian nationstate. Informatively, both Moynagh's and Bennett's volumes also include an array of approaches for how scholars, critics, and artists subvert and engage these difficult realities. What emerges in these lucid volumes is a survey of complex theatrical practices, practitioners, subject matters, and, especially in the case of Bennett's volume, methodology. Organized chronologically, African-Canadian Theatre and Feminist Theatre and Performance suggest historical trajectories and gesture towards a canon. However, with varying degrees of emphasis Moynagh and Bennett resist categorizing their respective volumes as authoritative accounts, and instead both editors highlight the importance of continued research and writing to the expansion of their respective fields. In her introduction, Moynagh enters into a necessarily nuanced discussion about the complicated ways in which dominant discourse in Canada collapses the historical, political, and cultural contexts of blackness in Canada with those of blackness in the United States of America. Moynagh's introduction thoughtfully identifies intersections between race/ethnicity and nation as key sites of contemplation and contestation in the work of African-Canadian theatre artists, critics, and scholars. The analysis of these intersections is subsequently expounded upon in divergent ways in George Elliott Clarke's Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden's Tightrope Time or Nationalizing Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Andrea Davis's Sex and the Nation: Performing Black Female Sexuality in Canadian Theatre, (1) Alan Filewod's 'From Twisted History': Reading Angelique, and Rinaldo Walcott's Dramatic Instabilities: Diasporic Aesthetics as a Question for and about Nation. The conundrum of black positionality in Canada vis a vis the influence of the United States of America also plays itself out in the volume's Suggested Further Reading list's subheading of Secondary Materials on Theatre and Drama, where numerous titles reference AfricanAmerican theatre. …