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22 - Contemporary Native North American Drama

from Part III - Native American Renaissance (Post-1960s)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Birgit Däwes
Edited by
Melanie Benson Taylor
Melanie Benson Taylor
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

Opening with a programmatic glimpse at Chris Pappan’s interventional exhibition Drawing on Tradition at the Field Museum in Chicago (2017), this chapter provides an introduction to, and a historical and thematic overview of, the genre of contemporary Indigenous drama and performance in the United States and Canada. The defining features of a fascinating and expanding genre are exemplarily highlighted with reference to plays by Spiderwoman Theater, Tomson Highway, Mary Kathryn Nagle, and Bruce King, among others. Locating Native North American drama in relation to academic approaches of the past decade, the chapter takes up Yvette Nolan’s reading of Native theater as a form of medicine and particularly examines the characteristics of multilingualism and heteroglossia, as well as a diversity of media and representational modes.

Keywords

Indigenous dramatheaterperformancestorytellinghistorical overviewplaywrightstransmotionChris Pappan
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Native American Literature , pp. 413 - 428
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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