Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

Volume 38, Number 1 (2017)

Staging the International Embrace: George Leslie Mackay Narratives on Taiwanese Stages

Submitted
August 15, 2017
Published
2017-07-06

Abstract

Josh Stenberg considers three Taiwanese productions of the last ten years (puppetry, Western opera, xiqu), which have dramatized the life of nineteenth-century Presbyterian missionary George Leslie Mackay. The article connects the way in which a Canadian white foreigner is represented on stage with Taiwan’s anxiety surrounding its lack of international recognition, arguing that Mackay has been enlisted in Taiwanese nation-building theatre as a wish-fulfilling stand-in for desirable foreigner behaviour. Since the legitimacy and characteristics of an autonomous Taiwanese consciousness (like Canadian identity) are disputed and evolving, this case serves to examine theatre as a medium during an embryonic stage in the production of nationhood: the Mackay productions are theatre for a nation that—depending substantially on foreign attitudes—may or may not yet be produced. Furthermore, attention to this Canadian character abroad broadens the discussion of Canadian intercultural theatre by drawing attention to how, since identities are dialogic, Canadians are not the only ones who get to decide who we are or what we mean.