Labyrinth of Hybridities

Marc Maufort is a professor of English-language literatures and drama at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He is the author of a monograph entitled Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism (2003), a comparative study of the realist aesthetic in contemporary Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand theatre. He has also edited or co-edited several books on American and postcolonial drama, including Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium (2002), Performing Aotearoa: New Zealand Theatre and Drama in an Age of Transition (2007), and more recently, Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama (2008).

Taking its cue from Eugene O'Neill's questioning of «faithful realism», voiced by Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, this book examines the distant legacy of the Irish American playwright in contemporary multiethnic drama in the U.S. It explores the labyrinth of formal devices through which African American, Latina/o, First Nations, and Asian American dramatists have unconsciously reinterpreted O'Neill's questioning of mimesis. In their works, hybridizations of stage realism function as aesthetic celebrations of the spiritual potentialities of cultural in-betweenness. This volume provides detailed analyses of over forty plays authored by such key artists as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Hanay Geiogamah, Diane Glancy, David Henry Hwang, and Chay Yew, to give only a few prominent examples. All in all, Labyrinth of Hybridities invites its readers to reassess the cross-cultural patterns characterizing the history of twentieth century American drama.

Contents: Multi-ethnic American drama - Eugene O'Neill - Dramatic realism - African American theatre - Latina/o American drama - First Nations drama - Asian American theatre.