Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya

Abstract

The relation of radical black South African theatre to European (post)modernism can be understood as a project of decolonizing the stage. Decolonizing the stage means not only a shift in historical and political consciousness away from a normative and oppressive whiteness, but a strategic turn to the material cultural practices, the signifying systems, of a recovered indigenous theatre which is also open to theatrical invention of every sort. To un-center the whiteness of the white supremacist theatre means in the first instance to stage that whiteness, to normalize it within a different set of rules. But that cannot be done without bringing in its wake an effect of retrospect on the white theatre that has been decentered, the whiteness of its writing made newly legible. The post of in this sense refers not only to the new products of a decolonizing culture, but to a new periodization of the colonial or metropolitan text itself; and if that text is also postmodern, the post of its postcoloniality is the same as the post of its postmodernity.' To see this is to make a postcolonial reading of the postmodern, a useful interpretive consequence of a decolonizing cultural project. This article explores at the same time an important political opportunity for a decolonizing theatre, the possibility of displacing normative male heterosexist representation.2