Renaming the rituals: Theatralizations of the Caribbean in the 1980s Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Canfield, Robert Alan, 1964- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 04:53:24 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282638 BWORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly fi*om the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter &ce, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infoimadon Company 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Aibor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 NOTE TO USERS The original manuscript received by UMI contains broken, slanted and or light print. All efforts were made to acquire the highest quality manuscript from the author or school. Microfilmed as received. This reproduction is the best copy available UMI RENAMING THE RITUALS: THEATRALIZATIONS OF THE CARIBBEAN IN THE 1980S By Robert Alan Canfield A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the GRADUATE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES In Partial fulfillment of die Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1998 UMX Number; 9829378 UMI Microform 9829378 Copyright 1998, by UAQ Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Robert Alan Canfield entitled Renaming the Rituals: Theatralizations of the Caribbean in 1492-1987 and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. 9-1 z-x/'j;! Date 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgement the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. 4 ACKNOWIEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the various people who have stood by me and this work in times of crisis, and in the celebrations that eventually followed. You became the main actors of this project and liberated its production. Special thanks to Dean Charles Tatum who played more than the role of director and reaffirmed the possibility of critical solidarity. Thanks also to Dr. Adela Allen in the Graduate College for her perserverance and strength, and to those who jumped, quite literally, to my defense. Thanks are also due to the graduate students who have been my compatriots in the struggle for the renaming of the rituals of our own indentation as well as that of our students. Warmest thanks to my wife and my family for their allowing me to remain center-stage for so long. DEDICATION This work is dedicated to those who are still denied access to the teatriom mundi. Homo ludens, all. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. PROIOGUE 10 II. ACTS I-IV (CHAPTER ONE) 23 ACT I: Master Scripts and Musings on History .. 23 ACT II: Staged Hierarchies and Slave Theaters .. 39 ACT III: Nationalizing Theater and Decolonizing Mise-en-scene 50 ACT IV: Walcott, Rhone and Renaming the Rituals 76 Works Cited/Chapter One 97 III. ACT V (CHAPTER TWO) 103 Writing My Own Last Act: Anglophone Caribbean Women's Theater and the Reinscription of the Figure of the Feminine 103 Works Cited/Chapter Two 157 IV. STATION BREAK (CHAPTER THREE) 160 Deflating the Disseminations of Conquest: Luis Rafael Sanchez and the Inter-Eruption of the Program Puertorriqueno 160 Works Cited/Chapter Three 211 7 TABIE OF CONTENTS — (CONTINUED) V. LOUVRI YON BAYE: (CHAPTER FOUR) 215 Dispossession at the Crossroads: Frank Fouche', Franketienne and the Liberation of the Haitian "espace invivable" 215 Works Cited/Chapter Four 284 VI. EPILOGUE 289 Transnational, Translational, Transformational Theater and the Transition to Other Sites .... 289 Works Cited/Epilogue 312 VII. APPENDIX A: POSTCOtONIAL GIOSSARY 315 8 ABSTRACT Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, in their recently published Postcolonial Drama; Theory. Practice. Politics, highlight the significance of metatheatrical tendencies in the resistance drama of Anglophone arenas of decolonization, particularly those of the Anglophone Caribbean. Insisting on such metatheater as more than simply postmodern play, Gilbert and Tompkins crucially note the emergence of a critically conscious theater that explores and explodes notions of subjectivity, ideologies of difference and monologies of mastery. My studies in postcolonial drama and theory have led me toward similar sites and modes of struggle, culminating in a project that focuses upon this act of metatheater in the Caribbean and seeks to interpret its socio- ideological/cultural implications in light of recent postcolonial, feminist, discursive critique. Generated out of nationalist Theaters of Dissimulation that enact an unmasking of the discourses of race and mastery so crucial to the dissemblances of colonial master-scripts, I argue that Caribbean theater in the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and the Antilles translates these early nationalist revolutions into an involutionary act, one that avoids the reinscription of patriarchal, racialist, essentializing notions of identity and attempts instead to deconstruct what Stuart Hall has termed 9 the "politics of representation." Through this spotlighting of image and image systems rather than identity politics, 80s playwrights make Edouard Glissant's concept of theatralization — the very act of cultural ontology — the main actor on the stage, creating a Theater of Dissimilation that, like Kamau Brathwaite's idea of "nation language," represents a cultural process of critical creolization. 10 RENAMING THE RITUALS: THEATRALIZATIONS OF THE CARIBBEAN IN THE 1980S PROLOGUE I make the cry my maker cannot make With his great round mouth: he must blow through mine! . But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? Aha, that is a question 1 Ask, for that. What knows—the something over Setebos That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought. Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance, There may be something quiet o'er His head. Out of his reach, that feels nor joy nor grief. (Robert Browning, "Caliban upon Setebos") Robert Browning's poetic imaging of Caliban's metaphysical brooding upon the nature of the transcendental seems especially fitting as an epigraph for a project 11 that posits a re-reading of Caribbean theater. Mere than the typical Browning dramatic monologue, this poem serves as a paradigmatic reenactment of the problematics of theater in the West Indies, of the dialectics in the construction of Caribbean theater in general, and of the crux of the relationships that demand center-stage in Caribbean performances: the relation between the master of the image and the images of self-mastery, between the colonizer's script and the role of the colonized, between the conquests of the stage and the enactments of resistance. Browning's location of his Victorian revisions of the "primitive," of theodicy and bourgeois morality into the mouth of Caliban, and hence onto the Caribbean that has been, for centuries now, a topos for cultural representation seems more than simply dramatic irony. In a sense, this poem, too, becomes part of the histories of Caribbean theater as it indicates, in its metatheatrical nature, the dynamics of theatrical representation in what Antonio Benitez-Rojo terms in his Repeating Island this "meta- archipelago" of the Caribbean. While Caliban remains chained to his mask in this poem, he can still liberate our understandings not only of colonial theatrics, but of the engendering of postcolonial theater and rituals of self- expression which reclaim these stages in the twentieth century.