Staging Diaspora: South Asian American Theater Today

Abstract

This essay attempts to show how contemporary South Asian American theater deals with a wide range of South Asian American experience and in so doing has created a “new aesthetic” within American theater. The South Asian American experience is a diaspora experience, but in the contemporary wider sense of the term. The plays under study are about the old and new home, about people assimilating into the mainstream or navigating between two cultures or even negotiating a transnational identity. They deal with contested ideas of nation, nationality and allegiance, and also explore the South Asian female body in the new culture. Central to my study are the works of emerging South Asian American playwrights. I have carefully chosen a full-length play by each of them, two only in the case of short plays, and paired them under separate rubrics in such a way as to argue how they represent the diverse yet connected, changing yet pervasive, historical, cultural and psychological tropes of the South Asian American diaspora. The essay, however, does not claim that the body of work chosen for the current essay – or the rubrics, for that matter – fully expresses “South Asian America” or its theater.