• Brechtian Theatre and the Glocal South The Case from South Africa

    Author(s):
    Loren Kruger (see profile)
    Date:
    2022
    Group(s):
    CLCS Global South, GS Drama and Performance, TC Marxism, Literature, and Society
    Item Type:
    Article
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/n7c0-ny95
    Abstract:
    The glocal scale offers a more productive frame for analyzing the transculturation of theatre, particular Brechtian theory and practice, than either the singularly local or the generalized global. Glocalization brings into focus networks of imaginative representation that may be missed in overbroad applications of global frameworks, particularly the Global South. Thinking glocally also enables historians to trace legacies of transculturation—the production of new forms and practices that emerge from these encounters through embodied transmission through performance. In contrast to the binary opposition between center and periphery that bedevils the “postcolonial,” glocalization tracks multiple lines of contestation, including those sites of theatrical and social contestation that acknowledge the glocal domination of elites in the South as well as the subor- dination of subaltern classes in the North and thus encourages more precise attention to ways in which people and ideas from the north are not merely from the north. Dissident socialist theatre-makers occupied glocally subaltern positions in Germany acted on their understanding of class struggle rather than any presumption of European superiority. Conversely, their black interlocutors in South Africa engaging with European culture, whether genteel Anglophile or militant Communist, as well as popular African practices, understood the glocalized entanglements of north and south. Using as a case study the transculturation of Brechtian theory and practice in testimonial plays and other forms in anti-apartheid and post-apartheid performance, glocalization tracks mutual and multiple networks of transculturation that move within as well as across diverse Souths and Norths. Keywords Glocalization, transculturation, Brecht, South Africa
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.31944/2022950203
    Publisher:
    UNITAS
    Pub. Date:
    2022-9-1
    Journal:
    UNITAS
    ISSN:
    0041-7149,2619-7987
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    1 year ago
    License:
    Attribution

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