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Casting Aside Colonial Occupation: Intersections of Race, Sex, and Gender in Cloud Nine and Cloud Nine Criticism! APOLLO AMOKO ... colonialism has long served as a metaphor for a wide range of dominations, collapsing the specific hierarchies of time and place into a seamless whole. [n this scenario, "to colonize" is an evocative and active verb accounting for a range of inequities and exclusions - that may have little to do with colonialism at alL As a morality tale of the present the metaphor of colonialism has enonnous force but it can also eclipse how varied the subjects are created by different colonialisms.2 A certain personal ambivalence defines my response to Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill's drama in two acts featuring an audacious attempt to parallel sexual and gender oppression with colonial and racial oppression. While the attempt to enact the interrelated nature of these oppressions remains attractive, the apparent ease with which a playwright and company drawn exclusively from and implicated by racial and colonial privilege make direct comparisons and equivalencies between gender/sexual and colonialist oppressions is disturbing. These comparisons and equivalencies are made despite critical material differences in the history of gender and sexual oppression within specific cultural contexts, and the history of colonialism and the peculiar history of gender and sexual oppression within colonialism. As a consequence, certain oppressed identities, for example white women, may have been provided with the prospect of empowering representation at the cost of consigning certain other identities, specifically African women, to further sUbjection and invisibility. In a bid to trace a certain coherence of effects in Western feminist practices of writing and reading, this examination of Cloud Nine concerns itself as much with the playtext as with its critical reception. Critical reaction to the play has focused disproportionately on what are perceived to be its "feminist accomplishments" to the near total exclusion of any in-depth or sustained examination of race and colonialism} Where passing review of colonialism has been made, it has been merely to point out how racism and sexism occaModern Drama, 42 (1999) 45 APOLLO AMOKO sionally interpenetrate or how racism, the play's "other" concern, illustrates sexism, the play's "central" or "ideal" concern. Critical discourses generated by Cloud Nine seem to imitate the structure of racialized omission inadvertently reproduced in the play. Acts of colonial occupation, mass murder, arson, and violent repression by colonial settlers in Africa depicted in passing in the first act of the play have attracted little critical attention. Virtually no attempt has been made in the critical writing on this play to investigate the manner in which the peculiar experience of African women under British colonial occupation has been effaced in Cloud Nine. Nor has any attempt been made to investigate the ways in which the experiences and struggles of white settler women (complicit, however contradictorily, in the colonial project) have been generalized, in a play set substantially in colonial Africa, to represent the plight of all women in a manner comparable to the way men were historically generalized to represent all humanity. One article, Elin Diamond's "Closing No Gaps: Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Empire," appears to question the impact of the "foregrounding" by these two feminist playwrights of gender critique at the expense of race and colonization.4 Diamond concludes that "unacceptable gaps" exist in the examination of race and imperialism in the works of the two playwrights, and attributes these "gaps" to their imperialist (British) background. However, despite noting in passing that women make up half the population of colonized nations, Diamond does not proceed to examine specifically the inherent differences between the respective histories of "colonized" and "colonizing" women. In two separate studies that examine Cloud Nine, Diamond herself foregrounds racially marked feminist concerns and almost entirely ignores race and colonialism.5 She seems to exempt feminist critics from critical review at precisely the same instant that she indicts the two playwrights for their implication in imperial ideology, leaving unexplored the sources of her own feminist authority even as she challenges the sources of Churchill's authority. Against this background of existing feminist examinations of Cloud Nine, it is instructive to trace the ruses of power (both institutional...

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