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When the Cutting Edge Cuts Both Ways: Contemporary Scottish Drama TOM MAGUIRE Developments in post-colonial and post-modem theory have suggested that being located on the margin in relation to a metropolitan imperial centre can become a positive and fruitful experience. Robert Nunn, for example, argues, "The margin ... is no longer the periphery but the frontier, the place of possibility .,,1 He cites the authors of The Empire Writes Back, who propose that the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial world to the "margin" turned upon itself and acted to push that world through akind of mental barrier into a position from which all experience could be viewed as uncentred. pluralistic and multifarious. Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creative energy.2 Such a view has two positive aspects to commend it. First, it identifies the possibilities for those on the margins, recognising that there is a potential in the creative space they occupy. Second, it helps to account for a range of realised creative projects whose existence otherwise would seem to contradict theories of the debilitating effects of colonialism. Nonetheless, there are pitfalls in applying it in practice to all post-colonial contexts. The following investigation into contemporary Scottish drama seeks to identify one such pitfall. The inclusion of Scotland within a discussion of post-colonialism is something of a departure within the field, since it has tended to be regarded as a willing partner in British imperialism. Its appropriateness is considered by Ashcroft et al. (33), with reference to Dorsinville's dominated-dominating model [which] forcefully stresses linguistic and cultural imposition, and enables an interpretation of British literary history as aprocess of hierarchical interchange in internal and external group relationships. This tentative consideration can be reinforced by reference to two distinct proModern Drama, 38 (1995) 87 88 TOM MAGUIRE cesses resistance to which is a post-colonial impulse: these are appropriation and marginalisation.1t is clear that Scotland, Wales, and Ireland were "the first victims of English expansion" (ibid.), since they were each independent nations which were appropriated through political connivance and/or military domination as part of the growth of England into "Great Britain." In this respect they are historically comparable to the societies around the world whose native peoples were subjugated through military, economic, or political control to become part of the "British" Empire. Likewise, the growth of movements within Scotland to reclaim autonomy for its peoples in the political, economic, and cultural spheres is clearly evidence of one kind of post-colonial consciousness. Further, the "subsequent complicity in the British imperial enterprise" (ibid.) of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland is no more significant than the role played by settler colonies such as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These colonies were, after all, the instruments of imperial control over territory and native peoples. A rehearsal of the development of the centre-margin paradigm is relevant here. Through the construction of their own indigeneity in these territories, such settler populations became increasingly resistant to imperial authority while remaining subject to its political, economic, and/or cultural hegemony. The centre-margin paradigm metaphorically expresses this balance in control and prestige between the colony and the imperial centre . Attempts to shift this balance are taken to represent a post-colonial impulse. The application of the paradigm in this sense, therefore, applies just as appropriately to Scotland as it does to Canada, for example.3 Of course, Canada has achieved a measure of political and economic autonomy which Scotland has not and, according to Nunn, the only barrier left to cultural autonomy is afeeling of inferiority, of being marginal. As I shall demonstrate , by contrast, Scotland has developed a post-colonial cultural consciousness without concomitant political and economic autonomy. At issue here, then, is the exact relationship between cultural autonomy or inferiorism and such political and economic independence. Historically, the marginalisation of indigenous Scottish drama in relation to the drama of the English metropolitan centre was achieved in a number of ways, in common with other colonised cultures.4 Nonetheless, since the early 197os, certain developments suggest that Scottish drama has begun to exert its independence from the English centre. While the Citizens' Theatre...

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