Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre Katherine Newey Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre. By Helen Gilbert. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. x + 274. $49.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. Sightlines is an important contribution both to theatre studies and post-colonial criticism. Indeed, it is Helen Gilbert’s placing of post-colonial theory in a dynamic relationship with performance studies which offers some of the most productive work of the book. As Gilbert writes in her introduction, her aim is to show how “theories of drama and performance have much to add to debates about how imperial power is articulated and/or contested through discourses centered on the body, space, language, and representation” (6). In a detailed argument Gilbert makes a powerful case for the centrality of performance to post-colonialism, both as a visceral representation of the varieties of lived experience in Australia in the late twentieth century, and as a test of post-colonial theory. This book, together with Gilbert’s other work (she is co-author with Joanne Tompkins of Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics published by Routledge [1996]) also demonstrates the power and sophistication of critical theory from the so-called margins. It is to the credit of the University of Michigan Press that they have recognised that a study of contemporary Australian theatre practice is of more than local interest. Gilbert’s discussion of identity politics is based on a flexible but rigorously argued concept of identity as relational. Gilbert develops a model of identity under colonization which, she argues, “should be conceptualized less as a fixed state than as a complex process informed by a continually self-constituting hegemony that is always under threat from competing discourses” (146). Working through this paradigm allows Gilbert to extend her analysis across a number of key subject positions which might otherwise be seen as mutually exclusive. She does this by dividing her discussion into five chapters, each dealing with a distinct category of post-colonial identity. The opening case study is of “canonical counterdiscourse,” a demonstration [End Page 228] of how the empire writes back, in this case to Shakespeare. The chapters which follow trace the multiple possibilities of contemporary Australian identity as constructed through performance: indigenous theatre, feminist drama, settler/invader plays, and neo-imperialism in an examination of the theatrical representation of Australian-Asian and Australian-American relationships. This approach has many advantages. By teasing out the strands of Australian experience and possible identities into these broad categories, Gilbert is able to bring together a number of potentially antagonistic subject positions in one coherent study. She does this delicately and carefully, with due acknowledgement and working through of difference. Throughout her text there is explicit and implicit recognition of conflicts and complications which can be productive. Gilbert’s chapter on indigenous drama is a prime example of the positive results of her careful negotiations between a rigorous critical analysis of a body of work and a recognition of the very real circumstances of deprivation and discrimination out of which this work is produced. As she writes, her analysis is not concerned with establishing a poetics of Aboriginal drama (for to do so might well be to speak for rather than about indigenous dramatic practice), but to outline “the strategic possibilities of performance for the production and consumption of this body of work as an expression of indigenous culture” (52). It is a complicated balancing act, though, and some things are blurred in the process. While the concentration on relatively discrete areas of subject formation allows detailed and careful analyses of plays and performances, unacknowledged contradictions emerge. The chapter on indigenous drama focuses almost exclusively on male Aboriginal writers, and while such an approach can be properly justified, Gilbert does not do so. This is also the case in Gilbert’s chapter on “Settler/Invader Plays.” Given the kinds of complex models of identity which Gilbert invokes, I would have liked to see some self-reflection on the theoretical and critical consequences of limiting the discussion of women’s theatre work into one chapter on feminist theatre. Such...