Collaboration, Identity, and Cultural Difference

When Egyptian Farag Fouda was assassinated on the streets of Cairo in June of 1992, playwright Karim Alrawi found himself compelled to remember his fellow writer in print. Alrawi mourned the loss of a civil rights activist and a writer undeterred by the threats of Islamic fundamentalists. His accusations were bold: Despite a number of bruising clashes with Al-Azhar, Egypt's Islamic university, he [Fouda] continued attacking bogus scholarship and the poisonous bigotry of the religious establishment and extremist Islamic groups.' An uncompromising commitment to the power of ideas and to the necessity for artistic freedom marks Alrawi's own cross-cultural work as well. A playwright who began his work in London's alternative theatre in the early 1980s, Alrawi has-in the last decade-modeled a collaborative theatre in which narratives of cultural identity and difference are centrally staged. As those of us engaged in theatre study struggle to imagine a theatre in which issues of nationality, gender, and race are effectively situated, the work of Alrawi-which refigures both the individual and his/her cultural identities--offers a process for rethinking socially-conscious theatre

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Identity (music · Sociology · Visual arts · Middle East Politics and Society · Theatre and Performance Studies