Staging Modern Vagrancy
Female Figures of Border-crossing in Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Churchill
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4552452 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Haiping Yan (0000-0001-7449-2616, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 245-262 |
| Publication date | 2002-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theatre Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0192-2882 • E-ISSN: 1086-332X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tj.2002.0067 |
| OpenAlex | W1977028411 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 8 |
As the irruption of the consciousness of border-crossings into our present cultural analyses evinces the escalated shifting of global human geography, articulations of "nomads" as "fluid," "flexible," or "liberatory" subjects have proliferated in our humanistic studies. 2 Joining the important debates resulting from such articulations, 3 this essay revisits the problem of border-crossing by examining its figurations in contemporary women authors' dramatic works. Specifically, through a reading of such figurations by Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Churchill, this essay sets up a critical encounter between a Ghanaian woman much ignored and an English woman much embraced in Euro-American feminist theatre studies. This juxtaposition has its linguistic and temporal justification: both Aidoo and Churchill write in English, and both are part and parcel of the cultural openings made possible by the disintegration of the British Empire in the post-World War II sea change, as Aidoo is among the prominent black writers redefining a radically transforming post-British Sub-Saharan Africa, and Churchill is among the leading English authors remaking the public scenes of the turbulent western metropolis. The focus of this essay, however, is on their distinct stagings of female figures moving across the fermenting horizons and organizing [End Page 245] boundaries of "intertwined modern world histories," 4 thereby bringing forth resonations in those otherwise separate movements. 5
Art · Consciousness · Literature · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2008 - 2025 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |