Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Re-shaping Identity Through the Body: An Analysis of K.S. Maniam’s The Sandpit: Womensis & Mark de Silva’s Stories for Amah
Get PDFThe fundamental concern of this paper is with issues of authoritative control over individual expressions of identity, as well as with the construction of identity within Malaysian society. There is a level of resistance to this process of construction and the subsequent imposition of identities on the individual at the authoritative level. The theatre is a particularly rich site for the staging of such resistance because it can physically embody, explore, and exhibit identities which challenge and subvert the official rhetoric. In this paper, I look specifically at how the physical bodies of the characters in certain plays become sites of contention; the plays in question are K.S. Maniam’s The Sandpit: Womensis and Mark de Silva’s Stories for Amah. In both plays, the bodies of the female protagonists can be seen as expressions of their identities, as well as sites which dominant figures try to re-shape and control. Â
The Theatre of Subversion: A Case from Kannada Theatre
Get PDFThe paper proposes to evaluate the on-stage politics of representing the subalterns through the medium of folk theatre in the selected plays of the distinguished Kannada playwright and poet H.S. Shiva Prakash. It provides a brief analysis of Shiva Prakash’s two plays performed widely viz., Mahachaitra: The Great Spring (1985), and Madaiah, the Cobbler (1991). Further, it focuses on the politics of adaptation in his unpublished play Sati:The Divination based on a Puranic story and its first stage production by H. Tomba in Assam. Our contention is that playwrights like Shiva Prakash use the power of the stage to subvert theatrical, political, and social conventions in India by employing the folk idioms of Karnataka.Â
