From Pre-apartheid to Post-apartheid Black South African Theatre: A contextual analyses of selected plays

Abstract

This dissertation explores the place of black theatre in a post-apartheid South Africa. It focuses on the theatre as a tool in fighting the evils of the apartheid regime, and informs on the prevailing realities in a new South Africa. It aims at analyzing the historical development of black drama, the politics, the aesthetics, and its continuing efflorescence, especially in identity politics in South Africa. This is implicated on how the play text is read and constituted, as it strives for local and universal attention within the canon formation, especially within the ambience of the post-colonial. This invariably raises the question: What-and-when is the post-colonial in post-apartheid South Africa, taking into cognizance the promises and pitfalls of nation building vis-à-vis cultural production of the ‘rainbow’ nation? This further problematizes the notion of African theatre within the universal concept of theatre. It infers that the misgivings (whether African theatre could be defined as theatre) is based on literary paradigm: an attempt at distilling theatre along the lines of Western model, rather than the theatrical (i.e. the performative or embodied), since identity have become generally construed in ‘performative’ terms. It considers a more appropriate perspective in order to accommodate the vigorous and prolific expressions in the output of contemporary South African theatre. The thesis suggests, for instance, that a better perspective is possible, if the object of investigation is theatre rather than literary drama. Here the act of avant-garde, and Schechner’s definition of performance as “what people do in the activity of their doing it” (i.e. performer and audience) furthers the discourse, giving African theatre its legitimacy and organizing principle. A central trope the thesis deploys in reading and critiquing post-apartheid cultural production, especially the theatre.

Asiasanat:Text, Race, Theatre, Aesthetics, Apartheid, Rainbow nation