Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:2 (Spring 2011).
Abstract
Understanding Native American drama requires a critical perspective often lacking in theater and academia. Christy Stanlake's book helps remedy this problem with a two-fold strategy. First, she identifies four Native-authored discourses generated in part by the study of American Indian fiction and poetry. Then she applies these discourses to readings from nine Native plays, showing how Native philosophies shape Native drama on the page and in performance. Stanlake explains that place, or "platiality," in western theater assumes new dimensions in Native drama, expressing complex relationships among character, language, and landscape. She examines the historical and political aspects of Native storytelling and demonstrates how the practice of "storying" and "tribalography" creates relationships, identities, and rhetorical spaces for story-sharing. Finally, Stanlake explores how Native playwrights deploy tactics of "survivance"-Indigenous concepts of time, motion, and Tricksterism-to survive and resist other-imposed constructions of Indianness from the dominant society or American Indians themselves.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.