Staging Intervention: Native Women, Decolonization, and the American Theatre

204 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.The terrain of American theatre scholarship has seen much change in the late twentieth century; as scholars investigate intercultural and post-colonial, African-American, feminist, and other "marginal" theatres, the discipline's boundaries must shift. Still, although American Indian people today perform, write, direct, and design for the stages of American theatre, scholars pay little attention to their work. Despite acknowledgments that representations of American Indians contributed to the growth of a national identity in American drama, mainstream dramatic criticism in America continues to read the representation of American Indians in American theatre as either "sympathetic" or villainous and to assign measures of value to these polarized definitions, reifying a popularly believed good Indian/bad Indian binary and implying that supposedly sympathetic portrayals do less damage than those understood as villainous. Additionally, recent scholarship on American Indian representations in American draw examines primarily masculine images, leaving the representational history of American Indian women in American theatre cloaked in a doubly determined silence. The present study begins at these sites of exclusion and silence.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD