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  • Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean by Emily Sahakian
  • Jodie Barker
Sahakian, Emily. Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean. University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp [i]-xiii; 274. ISBN 978-0-8139-4007-6. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8139-4008-3. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8139-4009-0. $75.00 (eBook).

Motion, contradiction, ambiguity, tension…these concepts comprise the multi-faceted lens through which Emily Sahakian's Staging Creolization investigates women's theatre and performance from the French Caribbean, as its subtitle suggests. The work's five chapters study seven theatrical texts from the [End Page 182] pens of Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, yet its most valuable contribution to the genre lies in its documentation and analysis of the theatrical works' original productions in the Caribbean or in France, as well as their U.S. premieres, notably at Ubu Repertory Theater in New York City. Sahakian's unique perspective as both a community-based theatre artist and a scholar on theatre and French and Francophone literature privileges the interaction between text and performance. This dynamic becomes the microscope under which she employs close readings, analyses, and evaluations of the texts, their gestures, staging choices and dramatizations, and even interviews and analysis of data on audience reception. All of these elements lead her to the book's primary premise that staging creolization "is akin to theatrical syncretism, which, according to Christopher Balme, "utilizes the performance forms of both European and indigenous cultures in a creative recombination of their respective elements, without slavish adherence to one tradition or the other" (4-5). The performances are crucial because, as Sahakian postulates, they act as "a space of creativity and transformation" that "embody, carry forth, and materialize the process of creolization" (5).

Chapters one through three, which the author considers "the first half" of her book, analyzes the plays according to the themes of "Unsettling the Gendered Stereotypes of Plantation Culture," "Remixing Unity and Difference," and "Syncretizing Performance and Moral Codes." The second half of the work focuses on the performances at Ubu Repertory Theater through the lenses of diaspora performances, and recasting the Francophone Caribbean couple. In a vein similar to the French Caribbean women playwrights whom she designates as "bricoleurs who work […] from cultural, historical, and epistemological fragments" (14), Sahakian builds a text based on multiplicities that dissects and questions performance practices of the Caribbean that ultimately, according to the author, "carry out cultural reinvention" (15).

Theorizing both the concept and practice of creolization as a process of uncertainty, tension and constant becomings certainly challenges the conventional tenets of Créolité. The term, Créolité, is known for its inward-looking, homemaking gesture via an unconditional acceptance of Creoleness as outlined in the canonical work "In Praise of Creoleness" where Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant describe it as "the cement of our culture…[which] ought to rule the foundations of our Caribbeanness" (Bernabé et al. 1990; 891). Some of Staging Creolization's most animated moments break up the historical cement upon which Creoleness has been rooted over the last three decades and takes its canon to task not only for its failure to incorporate women's voices in its theory, but especially for its characterization of Créolité as fixed and stable. Instead of relying upon the traditional Caribbean theoretical canon, Sahakian assembles diverse literary and performance theorists that include Christopher Balme, Stéphanie Bérard, Édouard Glissant, Christiane Makward, Judith Miller and Joseph Roach as part of the theoretical foundation of Staging Creolization. It is surprising that neither Henri [End Page 183] Bergson nor Gilles Deleuze are cited considering the text's insistence on multiplicity and active and dynamic "becomings" that are inherent in the staging of creolization itself. Yet even in spite of this, the theoretical assemblage of Sahakian's book is fascinating and strong.

It is thrilling to read a work that transparently engages with the more thorny issues of its genre. Staging Creolization does this throughout its study and ultimately calls its own name into question, further destabilizing any last concrete footing to which text and...

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