Theatre Research International

Table of Contents - 1997 - Volume 22, Issue 02  

Articles

Thinking Through Veils: Questions of Culture, Criticism and the Body

Donnalee Doxa1

a1 Donnalee Dox is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Arizona

When Homi Bhabha discusses the problematics of signification and coding in intercultural interpretation, he questions the relationship between practices and the experience of culture. By questioning the power of codes and signifiers to fix cultural identity, Bhabha allows that the stable object of culture might be caught ‘in the disturbed artifice of its signification’, that is, ‘at the edge of experience’. This suggests to theatre and performance studies that the culturally inscribed body need not be viewed as a stable repository of displaced and deferred codes. The body may be intercepted in situations, or at moments, when signification dissolves and is reconfigured.

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