Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama (review)

{ 277 } Book Reviews tual analysis, whether it is part of Williams’s expansive and thoroughly covered canon or some of the more than forty-­ five plays by the other playwrights. Overall, The Influence of Tennessee Williams provides valuable insights into both the enduring legacy of one of the great Ameri­ can playwrights and the themes, styles, and concerns of late-­ twentieth-century Ameri­ can theatre. While the essays are a bit uneven and may necessitate additional reading in order to follow the argument, most are clearly written and approachable. Scholars of Williams and Ameri­ can theatre can find fodder for discussion, and the comprehensive index will prove useful to scholars and students hoping to easily locate and distill relevant information on specific plays or playwrights. Many will probably locate this volume while searching for information on a specific play or writer and stay to learn more about Williams’s place in Ameri­ can ­ theatre. Elizabeth A. Osborne — Florida State University \ \ Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North Ameri­ can Drama. Edited by Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2008. 312 pp. €34.90 cloth. This volume serves to remind us that the past is always inevitably present in our cultural memory, that it is easily rewritten and most certainly not constituted solely by the white, Anglo-­ Saxon, male tradition. The past and its traces in the cultural memory of nations as complex as the United States and Canada include the settlers and conquerors but also necessarily the “settled” and conquered— those who were bought, sold, made invisible, and so never allowed to acknowledge or perform their identity or to hand it down to their descendants. Signa­ tures of the Past brings together twenty-­ one essays that explore how memory of the past and a national or cultural identity are created; it also explores how the forced denial of the past has affected the identity of African Canadians and Afri­ can Ameri­ cans, First Nation men and women, and those of Hispanic or Asian origin. The volume is made up of mostly academic essays, but it is built up around the centrally placed contribution of two Chicanas, the dramatist Cherríe Moraga and the performance artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez. The essays by Moraga and Herrera Rodríguez speak from the heart rather than from an impersonal center of learning. Moraga’s essay,“Indígena as Scribe: The (W)rite to Remember,” is clearly a piece of writing to which Moraga has { 278 } Book Reviews given much attention and thought. She invokes the past of the indigena, that is, the woman who has been colonized, demeaned, and denied visibility, and urges her to look backward and recover the ability of her forebears to live in greater proximity to the spirit of the“ancient original world (151).”Herrera Rodríguez’s essay is based on an interview with Cherríe Moraga and the text of her performance piece Cositas quebradas, which has been performed on various university campuses, including the University of Málaga, Spain, where I had the good fortune to see it. However moving the written version of Cositas quebradas undoubtedly is, I found the performance much more evocative of what Moraga has called “the broken places of our small life and grand history” (167). The remaining essays of the volume deal with plays written by playwrights belonging to majority or minority ethnic and national groups of the North Ameri­ can continent , and reinforce the message of the two centrally placed essays by Moraga and Herrera Rodríguez, namely, the importance of words in the creation of our history, the importance of memory, of not forgetting, and of learning to forge our identity not only from what the powers that be impose on us but also from that which comes from the heart, the spirit, the memory of the past. The best of the essays deal with the plays under examination not only as evidence that the cultural memory of specific groups of people has been obliterated but with the significance of production or performance. Harry J. Elam Jr.’s “Remembering Africa, Performing Cultural Memory” analyzes that wonderful scene in Lorraine...