Identities at Odds: Dramatic Syncretism and Indigenous Identity Representation

الشنوانى, داليا

doi:10.21608/sjam.2022.140075.1563

Identities at Odds: Dramatic Syncretism and Indigenous Identity Representation

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

داليا الشنوانى

کلية الاداب- جامعة المنوفية

10.21608/sjam.2022.140075.1563

المستخلص

The central aim of this paper is to foreground syncretism as a cultural as well as a communicative component of indigenous and native playwrights' constructions of the indigene. Dramatic syncretism is a widespread phenomenon in Africa, and the Caribbean, and is increasing in strength in the "Fourth World" or aboriginal cultures in North America and Oceania. It is a conscious programmatic strategy to fashion new dramatic forms in English as a Europhone language, a process that manifests varying degrees of bi- or multiculturalism. The study is laid upon the idea that those syncretic texts are used as methods of representation to articulate indigenous and aboriginal identities in the postcolonial discourse. The study attempts to examine syncretism and other modes denoting the impurity of cultures like hybridity, creolization, and transculturality as strategies of reconciliation between the "essentialist", "authentic", and "born" native identities and the "borne" identities imposed by the colonizer. The study picks up on this element by featuring localized and historicized dramatic readings of native indigenous identities constructions but in a way that avoids seeing these constructions as unified and stable to account for the paradox of the concepts of "authenticity, "purity" and "essentialism" often associated with representations of indigeneity in postcolonial discourse. Dramatic syncretism in this sense is a model of deconstructing western cultural imperialism, i.e., a model of decolonizing the stage.

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