Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama: Community, Kinship, and Citizenship (review)

Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama is a welcome addition to postcolonial studies, in which drama receives, in general, less critical attention than fiction. Even within postcolonial theatre studies, as Kanika Batra points out, the field is “often defined by the canonized work of a few male dramatists” (12). Thus, in identifying “the centrality of gender justice” in the work of individual feminist playwrights and progressive theatre groups from Jamaica, India, and Nigeria, Batra sheds new light on postcolonial drama, demonstrating the close ties between it and “feminist and incipient queer activism” in the three sites of her study’s focus (4).

The book’s focus on sexuality begins with the recognition that in these societies, which are more neocolonial than postcolonial, heteronormativity remains dominant. Indeed, as Chandra Mohanty and Jaqui Alexander have observed, postcolonial states often conflate citizenship with heterosexuality and thus treat nonheterosexuals as “disloyal to the nation” (qtd. in Batra, p.10). The individual dramatists and theatre groups discussed by Batra seek to challenge the cultural attitudes and legal proscriptions that limit sexual choices for men and women. To do so, they expand their focus to consider not only sexual identities (including those of gay, lesbian, transgendered, and transsexual people), but also the social, economic, and political issues that define the lives of women and sexual minorities: namely, low social status in patriarchal cultures, sexual exploitation (as when poor women use sex to obtain food for their children), and violence (including by the state, as discussed in chapter 3). In representing these issues, such theatre work “generates a dialogue on citizenship . . . [for] women and sexual minorities” (4) marginalized from nationalist discourses. Here, the terms of the book’s subtitle—community, kinship, citizenship—emerge. Batra indicates that, thanks to cultural norms in Jamaica, India, and Nigeria, “kinship is always already heterosexual”; hence, insofar as drama can counter such restrictive gender parameters, new community ties, as in “chosen families,” become possible (7–8).

The book is composed of six chapters organized into three parts, each focusing on a distinct geo-political region. Part 1 discusses theatre for development in Jamaica, looking first at Dennis Scott’s work set in prisons and hospitals (chapter 1) and then at the Sistren Theatre Collective (chapter 2). Part 2 examines postcolonial theatre in India, focusing on the street-theatre group Jana Natya Manch, or Janam (chapter 3), and then Mahesh Dattani’s drama on hijras—a transsexual and transgendered community—as well as Mahasweta Devi and Usha Ganguli’s Rudali, on women professional mourners (chapter 4). Part 3 shifts the scene to Nigeria, where Batra considers the group WIN (Women in Nigeria) and Femi Osofisan’s drama about a peasant revolt (chapter 5), as well as Tess Onwueme’s Tell It to Women, about women who challenge political corruption (chapter 6).

For reasons of space, I shall highlight one chapter from each of Batra’s three sections. In part 1, Batra considers two plays by the Sistren Theatre Collective in Jamaica, where Honor Ford-Smith served as artistic director during the period 1977–88. As Batra discusses, in Bellywoman Bangarang and QPH, the group presented a vexed sociological “pattern of teenage pregnancy, familial rejection, lack of economic support from the male partner, and destitution” (53). Although the dominant society blames women for “slackness,” which, as Batra explains, “is Jamaican for sexually loose behavior”—even when they become pregnant from rape—these plays challenge that cultural norm by featuring female characters who support the victims (60). For daring to represent such an attitude, this all-women’s group has faced real threats of physical violence, being labeled as “sodomites” and “man-royals” (a derogatory term for women considered masculine) during its history. Batra maintains, however, that hope for the future exists, given Sistren’s “continued relevance and strong voice,” as evidenced in the play it staged in 2009 before the Jamaican parliament to demand the legalization of abortion (66). Although this...