Wilson Harris and the Caribbean novel

Gilkes, Michael

Literature & Fiction

Longman Caribbean

The West Indian Novel (Twayne's World Authors Series)

History & Criticism

Twayne Pub

The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora. Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams. Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world. Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country's first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.

Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora

SOYINKA, Wole

Aidoo, Ama Ata

FUGARD, Athol

WALCOTT, Derek

Fairman, H.W.

Ladipo, Duro

Hawariat, Tekle

Zirimu, Elvania Namukwaya

Dramas & Plays

Methuen Drama

Both of the plays in this volume focus closely and dramatically on the pressures on the creative imagination of the writer and artist in the Caribbean. Couvade, which was first performed in Guyana in 1972 and published in 1974, references the Amerindian ritual where the man takes to his bed and “suffers” some pains equivalent to the pangs of childbirth while his female partner is in actual labor. On one realistic but symbolic level, Lionel’s wife Pat is in the latest stages of her pregnancy, but in her view her artist husband has become obsessed with the Amerindian-themed painting he is working on, to the detriment of his concern for her. At another ritual level in the drama, apparent only to Lionel in his dreams, a shaman enacts a collective ritual of offering and celebration of the gods. A Pleasant Career is based on the biography of the pioneering and conflicted Guyanese novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer. His career begins with the ludicrous ambition in the 1930s to be an internationally known writer in a society that has no conception of the artist or writer as other than something that comes from overseas. The play explores Mittelholzer’s early negotiations of the race and class hierarchies of color in British Guyana, his own position as the “swarthy” boy in a predominantly white family, and his resolute determination to beat down the doors of the London publishing world.

Two Plays: Couvade and A Pleasant Career (Caribbean Modern Classics)

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

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Books by Gilkes, Michael