Theatre Research International

Table of Contents - July 2010 - Volume 35, Issue 02  

Articles

In the Kitchen, Cooking up Diaspora Possibilities: Bailey and Lewis's Sistahs

SANDRA L. RICHARDS

Abstract

This article analyses Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis's play Sistahs (1994) as an instance of African diaspora feminism in the Americas. The drama's focus on five women in a Canadian kitchen displaces the hegemony enjoyed by African Americans as signifiers of blacknesss, challenging spectators as well as readers to remember instead the long history of blacks in Canada and the existence of multiple African diasporas in the Americas. Further, its rewriting of a 1970s cultural feminism dramatizes the labour of fostering an African diasporic sensibility and subverts that paradigm's conventional emphasis on heteronormativity.

sandra l. richards (s-richards@northwestern.edu) is Professor of African American Studies and Theatre with a courtesy appointment in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. From 2001 to 2004 she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies that supported ongoing research on issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the black Atlantic. Publications from that project have appeared in Africa and Trans-Atlantic Memories: Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations of Diaspora and History (2008), Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research (2007), The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies (2006), and Theatre Journal (2005).

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