Comparative Modernist Performance Studies in the Context of the Postcolonial: A Not So Modest Reappraisal

This article takes up Julia A. Walker and Glenn Odom’s proposal for comparative modernist performance studies (CMPS), arguing that the very performativity of this provisional and historicized theoretical process opens up radical potential in the field of postcolonial theatre and performance. First, it offers an account of how settler colonialism in Australia and New Zealand leads to the advent of problematic compensatory strategies in postcolonial modernity, which in turn produce radical modernist theatre performances. Second, it analyzes how space and time are organized self-reflexively in two plays from Australasia—Josephine Wilson and Erin Hefferon’s The Geography of Haunted Places and Apirana Taylor’s Whaea Kairau: Mother Hundred Eater—arguing that this self-reflexivity is characteristic of postcolonial performance. Ultimately, I demonstrate that it is at the intersection of CMPS and postcolonial studies that critics of postcolonial theatre and performance might find a way to relationally map our own historicized experiences of modernity and the modernisms they produce within a planetary context.