Native North American Theater in a Global Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference

Indigenous drama is at once the oldest and most innovative, the most heavily displaced and resistant American genre. Despite its increasing international presence over the past two decades, the field has so far been neglected by scholarship. This study seeks to chart the genre, in both the U.S. and Canada, by its contemporary manifestations from 1968 to 2004 and traces its historical entanglements in simulacral images and colonial surveillance. Placing particular emphasis on the fashioning of cultural identity, this approach situates Native theater in the larger framework of transnational methodologies. General questions of theatricality and representation are complemented by in-depth analyses of 25 plays by authors such as Hanay Geiogamah, Monica Charles, Gerald Vizenor, Spiderwoman Theater, Diane Glancy, Margo Kane, Tomson Highway, and Drew Hayden Taylor.