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Title: Signatures of the Past

Signatures of the Past

Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama

by Marc Maufort (Volume editor) Caroline De Wagter (Volume editor)
©2008 Conference proceedings 314 Pages
English Studies
Series: Dramaturgies, Volume 24

Summary

In the last decades of the twentieth century, North American drama has powerfully enacted the problematic notions of cultural memory and identity, as the essays assembled in this critical anthology demonstrate. Echoing Derrida’s non-essentialist interpretation of the term «signature», this collection provides an innovative focus on North American theatre and drama as a site of latent cultural memories. In this volume, the concept of cultural memory offers a privileged vantage point from which to redefine issues of diasporic identities, exilic predicaments, and multi-ethnic subject positions at the dawn of a new century. Playwrights examined here include noted Canadian and US artists such as Marie Clements, Eva Ensler, Lorraine Hansberry, Tomson Highway, Cherríe Moraga, Djanet Sears, Guillermo Verdecchia, August Wilson, and Chay Yew, to cite but a few. In the process of remembering, North American dramatists develop new aesthetic modes in which the signatures of the past merge with the present and foreshadow an imagined future.

Details

Pages
314
Year
2008
ISBN (Softcover)
9789052014548
Language
English
Keywords
Crises d'identité en Amérique du Nor USA Drama Kollektives Gedächtnis (Motiv) Kulturelle Identität (Motiv) Aufsatzsammlung Dramaturgie canadienne en anglais Théâtre aux États-Unis Mémoire culturelle Dramaturgie nord-américaine contemporaine
Published
Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2008. 314 pp.

Biographical notes

Marc Maufort (Volume editor) Caroline De Wagter (Volume editor)

The Editors: Marc Maufort is a Professor of English, American and postcolonial literature at the University of Brussels. He is the author of two monographs: Songs of American Experience. The Vision of O’Neill and Melville (1990), and Transgressive Itineraries. Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism (2003). He has edited or co-edited a number of critical anthologies, including Performing Aotearoa. New Zealand Theatre and Drama in an Age of Transition (2007). Caroline De Wagter is a Research Fellow with the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research at the University of Brussels. She holds an M.A. in Drama from Stanford University. Her current doctoral research concentrates on the negotiation of imagined identities in contemporary Canadian and American drama. She has published several articles in anthologies and journals such as Reading Without Maps?, The Making of Canada: A European Perspective, BELL, and Interlitteraria.

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Title: Signatures of the Past