Performing Black Canadas

Summary

Rinaldo Walcott argues that ‘Black Canadian theatre is forged and performed within the context of a diasporic sensibility or consciousness’ (Walcott 2005: 80). Certainly, if one understands diaspora in the terms that Stuart Hall has proposed, ‘a necessary heterogeneity and diversity … a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference’ (Hall 1994: 402), diaspora offers a useful way of conceptualizing not only black Canadian theatrical production, but black Canadian artistry in general. Whether the plays attend to specific experiences of blacks in Canada – as do, for instance, George Elliott Clarke's Beatrice Chancy, Lorena Gale's Angélique, Djanet Sears' Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, or George Boyd's Consecrated Ground – or whether they offer a more explicit engagement with the links between black Canadians and blacks elsewhere in the diaspora – as in such plays as ahdri zhina mandiela's dark diaspora … in dub, Debbie Young and naila belvett's yagayah: two.womyn.black.griots, or Andrew Moodie's Riot – attention to lives lived ‘with and through … difference’ is in evidence. Even as the heterogeneity of black Canadian theatre invites this sort of approach to diaspora, however, the capaciousness of Hall's definition poses some difficulty for attending to the particularities of ‘black Canadas’. As both Walcott and Diana Brydon have argued, black Canadas offer ways of rethinking both conventional narratives of nation and conceptions of diaspora (Walcott 2003: 35, 40; Brydon 2001: 31).