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Staging Diaspora: South Asian American Theater Today
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2012
Abstract
This essay attempts to show how contemporary South Asian American theater deals with a wide range of South Asian American experience and in so doing has created a “new aesthetic” within American theater. The South Asian American experience is a diaspora experience, but in the contemporary wider sense of the term. The plays under study are about the old and new home, about people assimilating into the mainstream or navigating between two cultures or even negotiating a transnational identity. They deal with contested ideas of nation, nationality and allegiance, and also explore the South Asian female body in the new culture. Central to my study are the works of emerging South Asian American playwrights. I have carefully chosen a full-length play by each of them, two only in the case of short plays, and paired them under separate rubrics in such a way as to argue how they represent the diverse yet connected, changing yet pervasive, historical, cultural and psychological tropes of the South Asian American diaspora. The essay, however, does not claim that the body of work chosen for the current essay – or the rubrics, for that matter – fully expresses “South Asian America” or its theater.
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References
1 Apart from Neilesh Bose's historical–critical introduction to the three South Asian American plays that he anthologizes in Part I of Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), his essay on Shishir Kurup's Merchant on Venice in South Asian Popular Culture, 7, 3 (2009), 195–209; Sudipto Chatterjee's historical overview of South Asian American theater in Theatre Survey, 49, 1 (2008), 109–17; and Dharwadker's, Aparna brief but insightful section on Indian diaspora theater in “Diaspora and the Theatre of the Nation,” published in Theatre Research International 28, 3 (2003), 303–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, there is little scholarly literature on South Asian American theater. Even the above-cited works are either not directly on the subject or lack critical depth.
2 Uzma Z. Rizvi, “Hybrid Forms, New Aesthetics, and History in the Making: A Report on Desi Drama: The First National South Asian American Theatre Conference,” available at www.srtp.org/images/archiveSRTP20%-%Desi%20Drama%20Report.pdf, accessed 4 Sept. 2010.
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32 Bina Sharif, “Artistic Statement,” My Ancestor's House, 263.
33 Ibid.
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