The Study of Pantomime as an Example of ‘Decolonizing Fiction’

This paper aims to analyze the play called Pantomime by Derek Walcott (1978) according to Greimas’s actantial model. The play problematizes issues of identity and validity of the binary oppositions such as master/slave and white/black through employing the master and slave stereotypes animated in the work called Robinson Crusoe. There are two characters named Trewe (S1), and Jackson (S2) in the play. S1, who is a retired English actor, sees his culture as superior to the native culture. S2, who is the servant of S1, has an inferiority complex as he is black. One day, S1, who runs a small hotel in Tobago and wants to entertain his guests at his hotel, wants to prepare a performance of the novel called Robinson Crusoe with Jackson. Interestingly enough, their performance does not reflect the binary oppositions based on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as in Robinson Crusoe. On the contrary, it openly reverses the roles performed by the colonizer and the colonized after a constant role-shifting by S1 and S2. At the end of the play, S2 asks for a raise from his employer S1 and this might be thought as a possibility for creating a world which is free from binary oppositions, and for starting a new sort of relationship based on an employee and an employer

Aesthetics · Art · Binary opposition · Literature · Servant · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies

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  Daniel Chandler•Semiotics•2003

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  Algirdas Julien Greimas, Paul Perron et al.•New Literary History•1989

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