Enacting Nature

This volume explores the multi-faceted semantics of ecology in contemporary Indigenous theater and performance. It focuses on the ways in which Indigenous playwrights from North America and Oceania depict the human link with Nature in today’s global age.

Birgit Däwes is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Vienna. She specializes in Native North American literatures and cultures. Next to a monograph study on (2007) and the recent collection, (2013), she has also published a study on fiction as a mode of cultural memory: (2011). Marc Maufort is Professor of English, American and postcolonial literatures at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium). He has written and (co)-edited several books on O’Neill as well as on postcolonial and multi-ethnic drama, including (2003), and (2010).

Contents: Birgit Däwes/Marc Maufort: A Chorus of Ecological Voices. Enacting Nature in Contemporary Indigenous Performance – Birgit Däwes: Stages of Resilience. Heteroholistic Environments in Plays by Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan – Ric Knowles: Mounds, Earthworks, Side Show Freaks and Circus Injuns – Jaye T. Darby: «Civilization» and its Transgressions on the Old Shawnee Trail. Lynn Riggs’s – Maryann Henck: «alterNature» in Drew Hayden Taylor’s . Construction and De(con)struction of Contested Spaces – Yvette Nolan: The Collapse of Worlds in Laura Shamas’s Nicholle Dragone: Eric Gansworth. Dramatizing the Ecology of Haudenosaunee Creation – Ginny Ratsoy: Voicing Nature in the British Columbia Interior. A Place «Back in the Midst of Time» in Kevin Loring’s – Maryrose Casey: Serving the Living Land. Place and Belonging in Australian Aboriginal Drama – Rachael Swain: Dance, History and Country. An Uneasy Ecology in Australia – Diana Looser: « Je te parle d’harmonie entre les plantes ». Ecologies of New Caledonian Nationhood in Pierre Gope’s Lisa Warrington/David O’Donnell: Unfolding the Cloth. Patterns of Landscape and Identity in The Conch’s Hilary Halba: Cleansing the Tapu. Nature, Landscape and Transformation in Three Works by M?ori Playwrights – Marc Maufort: Performing the Spirit of the Earth. Multi-faceted Aesthetics of Ecology in Contemporary Indigenous Drama.