To Be is to Be Seen: Postcolonial Theory, Existentialism, and the Theater of Athol Fugard

Abstract

Critics have noted the palpable influence of existentialism on the plays of Athol Fugard—an influence that Fugard acknowledges in his Notebooks as having resulted from his reading of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Through a treatment of Fugard’s major plays—in particular, The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, and The Island—the essay examines the descriptive possibilities engendered by the synthesis of the existential with the postcolonial via theater. The essay begins by returning to the debate staged by Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as the point of initial intersection between these discourses, and by doing so, works to salvage the productive elements of this synthesis that were later abandoned by poststructuralist critics. Finally, the essay turns to an interrogation of theater as a medium uniquely capable of articulating, while still respecting, the politics of Otherness and difference.