DENIS SALTER
This position-paper suggests that both postmodernist and postcolonial thought have been playing a significant-although radically incommensurate and unacknowledged-role in the postwar formation of English-Canadian theatre historiography. Inspired by two ground-breaking collections: The Empire Writes Back, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge 1989) and After Europe, eds. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin (Sydney: Dangaroo Press 1989), it concludes with a modest manifesto of eight issues which together define one kind of postcolonial theoretical model for the (re)writing of English-Canadian theatre history.
Cet article constitue une prise de position où l'auteur propose que les théories postmoderniste et postcoloniale auraient joué et continueraient de jouer un rôle important, quoique fort disproportionné et à peine reconnu, dans l'élucidation d'une historiographie du théâtre au Canada anglais. Cette communication s'inspire de deux ouvrages collectifs de défrichage dans le domaine: The Empire Writes Back, par Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths et Helen Tiffin (Londres: Routledge 1989), et After Europe, éd. par Stephen Slemon et Helen Tiffin (Sydney: Dangaroo Press 1989). L'article se termine par un modeste manifeste où sont identifiés huit sujets problématiques qui, pris ensemble, définiraient une sorte de modèle théorique pour la (ré)écriture, du point de vue postcolonial, de l'histoire du théâtre canadien-anglais.
Not so long ago, the writing of Canadian theatre historiography seemed a pretty straightforward and harmless occupation. Historians chose, oftentimes unwittingly, interesting problems or subjects, undertook exhaustive research into primary and secondary sources, and disseminated their findings, normally in the form of empirically oriented chronological narratives. As a body of historical documentation grew exponentially in both size and importance, evidentiary standards seemed to be self-justifying and hardly in need of interrogation; theatre could be studied as an autonomous (or perhaps semi-autonomous) aesthetic object and cultural formation without much reference to a larger intertextual and social context; and the ideological implications not only of theatre itself but of our own scholarly study of it-could be happily ignored.
And then everything-and I mean everything-began to change. We can all no doubt remember individual moments, private epiphanies, after which our intellectual selves could never be quite the same. For me it happened one hot summer's day in Montréal, reading Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, a novelistic--do I dare say fictional?-attempt to entrap that ghostly presence, that omnipresent rogue, that unsolved theatrical mystery, Ambrose Small. Then-conclusively-the hard-and-fast divisions between imaginary and empirical worlds which I had been holding onto for far too long seemed to dissolve; and so, too, did the essentialising differences and generic barriers which had kept those worlds securely in place.
Novelists, theorists, playwrights, philosophers: they, together with historians, have played a significant role in what seems to me to be the inevitable and indeed desirable-reconceptualisation, in content and form, of the discipline of theatre historiography. In this brief position-paper I want to outline some of the recurrent, sometimes nagging, problems in both theorising and practising theatre history which have been perplexing me over the last few years. Initially I was surprised to discover that these problems are not unique to Canada. However, systematic reading of Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, and Critical Theory and Performance,2 reveals that these problems are also fundamental to the reappraisals of theatre historiography which have recently been taking place in the United States where there have been some sharply worded differences of opinion about the kinds of values which so-called conventional theatre historiography has tended to legitimise. My concern in the Canadian context is also, I suspect, a question of values, as I focus my attention on the relationship between Canadian theatre historiography-the salient ways in which our discipline has sought to construct itself since the mid-seventies in particular-and the troubling, unresolved nexus between two dominant 'isms' of our time: postmodernism, on the one hand, and postcolonialism, on the other.
When I reflect back upon the various manifestations of Canadian theatre historiography in the formative decade of the 1970s, I come up with clichés in what is-admittedly-a personal exercise in nostalgia. I suppose that my preoccupation, then as now, was with the dispersed subject-positions from which it sometimes seemed possible to speak, despite the responsibility to remain silent in the face of so much ontological and epistemological uncertainty. What I can present with some confidence, however, are the specific obsessions of a white, middle-aged, male academic whose intellectual development has been shaped by the paradigm-shifts of the postwar intellectual boom. If memory serves-and I am no longer sure that it does-becoming a theatre historian was once an assertion of both personal and public identity, a way of overcoming that legacy of nonbeing which has done so much psychological damage in colonialised societies like Canada and Quebec. The main objective in the founding, in 1976, of an organisation like the Association for Canadian Theatre History was, I think, to recuperate a theatre history which we could call our own, a theatre history which would connect us with the imperium but which would also confer a distinct identity on us, here and now, as if forever. The collective discovery of our theatrical beginnings, our cultural origins, would authorise our existence as a people, and give us a totalising narrative frame-at once linear and teleological-in which to locate ourselves.
The building up and description of hitherto ignored primary source materials in various libraries and archives across the country, the establishment of journals such as Canadian Drama/L'art dramatique canadien in 1975 and Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du théâtre au Canada five years later in 1980, the publication of ground-breaking reference works, including The Brock Bibliography of Published Canadian Plays in English 1766-1978, and A Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History 1583-1975, the recovery of long out-of-print plays, most importantly, Canada's Lost Plays in four volumes: all these things seemed to guarantee that our discipline could stand, immoveable, on the hard rock of positivist research.3 Collectively, we were determined to succeed in bringing into existence subjects which had been effaced or suppressed in conventional historiography. Scholarship, like the theatre itself, was a kind of mirror in which we could see ourselves reflected, perfectly and whole. Not for us the demoralising habits of the past in which we would look into the mirror and see nothing but the empty face of the colonized Other.
How enchantingly naive it all now seems: the scholar's version of the perennial romance of Canada; the intellectual's unsullied experience of a brave New World. Well, it is now 1992, five hundred years on, and the romance of journeying into an undiscovered world has long since turned dangerous, self-serving, and problematic, an occasion not for celebration but for protracted doubts about the immoral consequences of imperialistic exploitation. The postwar crisis of (predominantly) Eurocentric forms of representation has now led, I think, to a disorienting-but intellectually healthy-reexamination of the methodological naiveté in which some of us indulged ourselves around the time that Canadian theatre historiography was coming into existence and indeed consolidating its intellectual 'progress.' How many of us, I now wonder, seem to have assumed that mimesis was inherently unproblematic, that representation was not/never could be in a state of crisis, and that comprehensive narratives and factual bibliographies were intrinsically value-free as they circulated in a kind of free market economy of ideas? How many among us thought that authorising ourselves, as part of an historical phase of postcolonial definition, was justifiable as an exercise in self-legitimation, and not in any sense a potentially dangerous move towards authoritarianism? How many of us were determined to believe that 'us' was a nonexclusive category to be invoked with the same unthinking ease with which monarchies and newspaper editors refer to themselves with the 'royal we'? Who, in other words, was speaking? about what? to whom? and on behalf of which systems of (unexamined) values?
There was, I want to argue, a paradox at the centre of our work towards cultural and historical recuperation, a paradox which now requires acknowledgment and investigation. Theatre historiography-conceived and executed within the ideology of nation-building-seemed, at one level, to be a form of resistance and disidentification, a disavowal-by all of us-of the colonial past, an intellectual revolution, and the beginning of an alternative narrative which would underwrite a collective engagement with the ideological ideals of postcolonial liberation. Theatre historiography-most effectively through the consolidation of documentary historical evidence-would seek to legitimate Canada's status as a decolonized, emergent, and unified nationstate. Theatre historiography-like the contemporaneous alternative theatre movement recently described in Denis W Johnston's Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto's Alternative Theatres (U of Toronto P 1991)-was not just intended as departure from, or variation on, existing theatre scholarship: rather, it was a radical critique of that scholarship, what we would now call an oppositional or perhaps counterhegemonic strategy. Or so it seemed, as a new nation and a new discipline shaped by that nation were being extensively reformed.
In retrospect, I must say that I now wonder if this kind of theatre historiography in fact achieved exactly the opposite of what it had intended. Questions abound: providing definitive answers still seems premature. Did this new historiography serve to consolidate, rather than dislodge, the reactionary values of nineteenth-century-derived assumptions about nationalistic supremacy? Did it operate by exclusionary principles, ignoring, if only unwittingly, profound differences-in race, in class, and in gender? Did its eagerness to create comprehensive or totalising narratives-here I am thinking not only of early works like Murray D Edwards's A Stage in Our Past, English-language theatre in Eastern Canada from the 1790s to 1914 (U of Toronto P 1968) but also of their more recent counterparts, including The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, edited by Eugene Benson and L W Conolly (Toronto, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP 1989)--effectively suppress the problematisation of its own practices? Did the search for national legitimation and canonical authority which culminated, I think, in the publication in the mid- 1980s of three anthologies: The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama, ed. Richard Plant (Toronto: Penguin Books 1984), Major Plays of the Canadian Theatre 1934-1984, ed. Richard Perkyns (Toronto: Irwin Publishing 1984), and Modern Canadian Plays, ed. Jerry Wasserman (Vancouver: Talon Books 1985) mark a retrogressive need to invent a centralising 'great tradition' at the expense of the ex-centricity of the margins? And, finally, did our scholarship foster the exchange of ideas and the development of comparative studies between Canada and Quebec, or did it simply confirm the assumption that these two cultures seem to function best, in both theory and practice, as contiguous solitudes?
At the same time that I pose these recurrent questions I have to remind myself that from early on there was a counterbalance of themes and formations at work, emphasising what I still regard as significant, 'legitimate' topics: dismantling cultural stereotypes, struggling for self-knowledge and self-authentication, and de-privileging the pervasive influence of essentialised universal categories of value. At a simple but important level, 'regionalism'-as a theoretical construct-seemed an effective strategy for the recovery and validation of local forms of knowledge. I am thinking of the heady mixture of astonishment, pride, and insight which greeted the publication in the early 1980s of Mary Elizabeth Smith's Too Soon the Curtain Fell: A History of Theatre in Saint John 1789-1900 (Fredericton: Brunswick Press 198 1), John Orrell's Fallen Empires: The Lost Theatres of Edmonton (Edmonton: NeWest 1981), Chad Evans' Frontier Theatre: A History of Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Entertainment in the Canadian Far West and Alaska (Victoria: Sono Nis 1983), and E. Ross Stuart's The History of Prairie Theatre: The Development of Theatre in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan 1833-1982 (Toronto: Simon & Pierre 1984). As their titles alone indicate, these studies were inspired by a neo-Darwinian nineteenth-century passion for the classification of primary source data into stable univocal narratives and by the shared assumption that the dissemination of culture can only be rendered one way: as a self-affirming, relentlessly linear myth of human progress. However, despite their preservative function, these studies helped to disable the master discourse of colonialism by recovering for us the kind of theatrical legacy which imperialistic domination had managed to suppress through a combination of benign neglect and patronising indifference. Moreover, these studies served to remind us that history is not written, it is rewritten, that it is a provisional construct which is always ideologically-determined. Thus, as an unexpected by-product they stimulated, I think, a kind of collective desire to create noncoercive, responsible, multivalent, and nonreductive interpretative models by which to understand both theatre and theatre scholarship as synchronic (rather than diachronic) cultural/institutional formations which must, as a matter of course, seek to interrogate their own ideological assumptions.
This digressive preamble brings me to my main concern: how some of the recurrent conflicts between postmodernism and postcolonialism have undermined the self-determining aspirations which have been an essential part of the practice of Canadian theatre historiography. Postcolonialism, I believe, is often conflicted by its Janus-faced investment in seeking to recover the past-as a kind of inviolate paradigm of lost cultural origins-while at the same time attempting to reconcile itself to current and future cultural adaptations. It often ends up being both reactionary and exclusionary, replicating, in fact, the imperialistic values---of appropriation, marginalisation, dislocation, and alienation-which it was supposed to subvert. At its best, however, postcolonialism has been preoccupied with strategies of self-validation and self-containment, and with various forms of counterhegemonic representation which attempt to give voice to the voiceless, to make human agency possible, and to bring an end-permanently-to self-defeating parody, self-effacement, and the self-abnegating postures of what V S Naipaul has memorably described as The Mimic Men. Postcolonialism can allow a dispossessed culture to achieve an integrated (but never unified) set of subject-positions from which to resist-and eventually overturn-imperialistic domination and fragmentation.
A central problem arises, however, when examining how postmodemism-as a kind of contemporary hybrid containing dated examples of nineteenth-century European imperialism-has sometimes managed to defuse postcolonialism's radical agenda. Postmodernism is, of course, a large, diverse, and complex subject, containing many movements and sub-movements; I can only sketch in some of its features and implications here. Above all, postmodernism is based on a principle of heterogeneous scepticism towards everything: how things mean, how subject-positions are constructed, how the centre attempts to assert control over the margins, and how (logocentric) claims about definitiveness, truth, stability, and the like are nothing more than intellectual chimera-vestiges of the kind of self-righteous empirical scholarship which saw no need to reexamine its own assumptions and practices. So far, I have no objection.
But postmodemism, like postcolonialism, is also conflicted: despite its professed interest in intellectual and representational freedom, it often assumes a position of magisterial authority. So-called Third World cultures often treat it as a form of Eurocentric or Anglo-American intellectual intervention which might lead to exploitation and domination. Dependent on First World anxieties about the loss of universalist hegemony, postmodemism is often driven, I think, by a colonising function as it seeks to mimic the networks of power and knowledge which it was supposed to help dismantle. It purports to emerge from ideological concerns but can all too readily aestheticise human experience, including politics; its indulgence in hyper self-consciousness can lead to a kind of intellectual inertia, its famous crisis of exhaustion, and the narcissistic cultivation of the endless ahistorical deferral of meaning, together with a reluctance to ground theory in practice; and finally, it is inclined to conflate various types of nationalism into a common Nationalism, annulling or assimilating the presence of the Other, and misprising not only nationalistic differences but also their (paradoxical) attempts to overthrow dominant forms of political, cultural, and intellectual authority-including postmodernism itself.
It is still too early for me to imagine what postmodernist theatre historiography would be like-though I certainly plan to project such a model in a future paper-but I know that it would be at odds with postcolonial theatre historiography. They are so incommensurable that no amount of negotiation between them seems possible or even desirable. Whereas postmodernist theatre historiography would seek to debunk traditional approaches to history, unmasking their coercive value-systems and their ersatz truth-claims, postcolonial theatre historiography would seek to demonstrate how meanings are indeed possible, how their ideological determinants can be isolated and contained or subverted, and how historiography itself is a form of social practice-an object-lesson in the problematic of identity-formation and identity-politics. In quite different ways, Alan Filewod's Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (U of Toronto P 1987) and Robert Wallace's Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada (Saskatoon: Fifth House 1990) are both instructive examples of some of the directions which postcolonial theatre historiography might take. They show us, for example, how historians are always implicated in the construction of their narratives and how the conventional pseudo-scientific distinctions between subject/object and observer/observed no longer have any validity. Moreover, by resisting the neo-universalist, ahistorical, subject-less strategies of much postmodernist theatre historiography, they demonstrate that postcolonial theatre historiography emerges from a direct engagement with principles of self-localisation, self-legitimation, and self-liberation. It does not deny the possibility of meaning, but is preoccupied with how the interaction of many different locations of meaning can give rise to principles of radical contingency.
All these preliminary impressions and thoughts lead me to a modest manifesto, a set of eight strategies, positions, and issues which postcolonialist theatre historiography can claim for itself as an extended exercise in self-determination. They are not placed in a hierarchy of importance but rather form a matrix of equal significance, a gallimaufry of historiographic possibilities, some tentative, some exploratory, some half-baked, others more fully worked out. They are part of a longer project in which I want to develop a model for one kind of postcolonial theatre historiography if such a thing, in light of what I have suggested so far, can amount to something more than a self-defeating contradiction in terms.
[1] Historical writing, of any type, is of course a (potentially coercive) system of representation. But this does not mean that it is violently divorced from empirical evidence, 'truth' (however loaded a term), or historical reality. Because of its history of 'enunciatory slippage,' postcolonial theatre historiography is always preoccupied with the problematic relationships among various codes of signification, to make explicit-and, most of all, to interrogate-the ideological and representational systems by which we are interpellated.
[2] Postcolonial historical consciousness resists the temptation to closure, developmental teleology, progress-narratives, and covering law models of historical change emerging from monocentrist and ethnocentrist value-systems. Based in part on postpositivist assumptions, it cultivates destabilising structures and resists diachronic forms of cognition.
[3] Postcolonial theatre historiography is indeed recuperative, but not at the level of so-called uncontaminated, originary evidence. Rather, it brings to the surface repressed/suppressed epistemological critiques of traditional systems of knowledge, in particular, Eurocentric discursive practices. As an alternative mode of inquiry, it is frankly suspicious of any attempts at demonisation.
[4] Postcolonial theatre historiography is predicated on differences marked by gender, race, class, and nation. These differences are not seen, however, as accommodating exercises in multiculturalism (this is the classic liberal position) but lead to radical reconceptualisations of historiographic practices based on the concept of métissage or a hybridised model of cultural and social transformation.
[5] Agency is often de-emphasised in postmodernist practice; in postcolonial practice, however, it is a strategic choice which confers power and allows for at least the possibility of social change; as a calculated return to humanism, agency here is pragmatic, active, and grounded in the dialectic of both theory and practice as it seeks to deflect the all-pervasive authority of the historical past.
[6] Agency, in the context of postcolonialism, is in part aligned with older notions of the autonomous and integrated subject. It recognises, however, that it will always be circumvented, as it continues to question the social and material conditions-together with the many forms of ideological misrepresentation-which continue to produce the human subject.
[7] Irony, in postcolonial theory, is reconstituted not only to unmask the traditional discrepancies between appearance and reality, but to problematise the inescapable binary relationship of the coloniser and the colonised. Although irony, deployed by the latter, disrupts the normative assumptions of colonising authority, it cannot succeed in permanently subverting them. Irony, however, serves as a polysemic mode by which postcolonial societies can exert at least some provisional control over the cognitive structures which govern their discursive formation. Irony, then, is a form of utopian resistance, gesturing towards the principle of radical heterogeneity.
[8] Finally, allegory, like irony, is reconstituted to underscore the tensions between essentialising orthodoxies of thought and their shifting modes of re/presentation. Self-referential, heterogenous, and discontinuous, allegory draws attention to both the explicit and implicit ways in which cultural meanings are generated. It is here that the indeterminacy of postmodemism and the ambivalences of postcolonialism overlap but in such a way that the latter can continue to function as an alternative historiographic mode.
These propositions are, as I warned at the start, simply entry-points to larger issues. Each of them could readily develop into a full-length paper and together they could-and will-form a book. Each of them perplexes me in different ways, as they raise questions about both why and how theatre historiography can create meanings within a wider theoretical context. I fully admit that there is more than a bit of intellectual nostalgia at work here. I think that, as a postcolonial subject, I do harbour the thought that stable meanings exist ... somewhere; and that postcolonial theatre historiography can indeed celebrate the ways in which it has managed to authenticate-but not to authorise-an imaginary community of shared, knowable, and ethical values.
Postmodernism tells me that these, too, are just more self-deluding intellectual will-o-the-wisps. Perhaps they are; but, to be frank, I remain happily unconvinced. What I want to develop are a set of interpretative strategies so that postcolonial theatre historiography can indeed function as a self-legitimating,self-authenticating, but de-essentialised, academic discipline which is responsive to postmodernist ontological uncertainties, ambivalences, and crises, to be sure, but which is able to resist them, at the same time.
NOTES
ON NATIVE GROUND: CANADIAN THEATRE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE POSTMODERNISM/POSTCOLONIALISM AXIS
DENIS SALTER
1 This is a revised version of a position-paper read to the Association for Canadian Theatre
Research at the University of Prince Edward Island in May 1992. 1 am grateful to Richard Paul
Knowles, Robert Lecker, and Richard Plant for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Unless noted
otherwise, all cited works are published in Toronto
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2 Interpring the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Per ormance ed THOMAS
POSTLEWAIT AND BRUCE A MCCONACHIE (Iowa City:University of Iowa Press 1989);
The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics ed SUE-ELLEN CASE and
JANELLE RERSIELT (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press 1991); Critical Theory and
Performance , ed JANELLE G REINELT and JOSEPH R ROACH (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press 1992)
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3 The Brock Bibliography of Published Canadian Plays in English 1766-1978 ed ANTON WAGNER (Toronto: Playwrights Press 1980); A Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History
1583-1975 ed JOHN BALL and RICHARD PLANT ( Toronto: Playwrights Co-op 1976);
Canada's Lost Plays vol I ed ANTON WAGNER and RICHARD PLANT; vols 2-4 ed ANTON
WAGNER (Toronto: Canadian Theatre Review Publications 1978-1982)
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