'Theatre as Alter/“Native” in Derek Walcott' attempts a close and detailed politico-aesthetic analysis of his major plays. At the core of this book lies the attempt to answer the question of how postcolonial artists and intellectuals have dared to imagine radically different ways of living in the face of oppositional, binary choices. And as the title suggests, Walcott’s plays carve out critical spaces for new narratives of “becoming” and alternative priorities, entangled in contesting identities inscribed by race, language and ethnicity. Theatre, as Walcott knew, would be instrumental in demystifying Caribbean “Absence” and “Void” and generating an alternative version of dominant reality. By a deliberate unseating of the Western texts, filled with banal stereotypes and their representational biases, and by triggering “re-action” to the scripts of the colonizers in profoundly paradoxical ways, Walcott’s plays affirm the Caribbean identity. This study seeks to demonstrate how his plays open an alter/“native” universe in terms of aesthetics, dramaturgy and the performative, and reclaims ‘New World’ identity in terms of negotiation rather than negation—undermining the claim of “solid”, “authentic” culture. Placing the arts at the forefront of nation-building, Walcott situated his plays at a crucial juncture between the passing of the Empire and the newly-born Federation in his archipelago.

This book examines one of the most influential modern theatre companies, 7:84 (Scotland), under the directorship of John McGrath. 7:84 (Scotland) has been a vital contributor to the place and importance of alternative theatre on the modern British stage. DiCenzo explores the development of this company, the growth of popular theatre in general within the last twenty years and offers a methodology for analysing records and materials found in theatre company archives and illustrates the many issues inherent in running a theatre company, including venues, practitioners and the politics of funding. The book includes valuable primary source material and informative production photographs and company posters.

During the same period in which Derek Walcott was pouring immense physical, emotional, and logistical resources into the foundation of a viable first-rate West Indian theatre company and continuing to write his inimitable poetry, he was also busy writing newspaper reviews, chiefly for the Trinidad Guardian. His prodigious reviewing activity extended far beyond those areas with which one might most readily associate his interests and convictions. As Gordon Rohlehr once presciently observed, “If one wants to see a quotidian workaday Walcott, one should go back to [his] well over five hundred articles, essays and reviews on painting, cinema, calypso, carnival, drama and lite¬rature,” articles which “reveal a rich, various, witty and scrupulous intelligence in which generous humour counterpoints acerbity.” These articles capture the vitality of Caribbean culture and shed additional light on the aesthetic preoccupations expressed in Walcott’s essays published in journals. The editors have examined the corpus of Walcott’s journalistic activity from its beginnings in 1950 to its peak in the early 1970s, and have made a generous selection of material from the Guardian, along with occasional pieces from such sources as Public Opinion (Kingston) and The Voice of St. Lucia (Castries). The articles in Volume 2 are organized as follows: the performing arts; general surveys of anglophone Caribbean drama, theatre, and society; festivals, theatre companies, and productions; British and American drama; dance and music theatre; Carnival and calypso; and cinema screenings in Trinidad. Volume 2 additionally contains an exhaustive annotated and cross-referenced chronological bibliography of Walcott’s journalism up to 1990. The co-editor Christopher Balme has written a searching introductory essay on a central theme – here, a survey of West Indian theatre and Walcott’s engagement with it, particularly the idea of a ‘National Theatre’, coupled with an illustrative discussion of the playwright’s seminal dramatic spectacle Drums and Colours.

This first volume of ASNEL Papers gathers together a broad range of reflections on, and presentations of, the social and expressive underpinnings of post-colonial literary cultures, concentrating on aspects of orality, social structure and hybridity, the role of women in cultural production, performative and media representations (theatre, film, advertising) and their institutional forms, and the linguistic basis of literature (including questions of multilingualism, pidgins and creoles, and translation). Some of the present studies adopt a diachronic approach, as in essays devoted to European colonial influences on African literatures, the populist colonial roots of Australian drama, and the intersection of exogenous and autochthonous languages in the cultural development and identity formation of Cameroon, Tanzania and the Swahili-speaking regions of Africa. Broadly synchronic perspectives (which nevertheless take cognizance of developmental determinants) range over dominant genres — poetry, short fiction and the novel, children's literature, theatre, film - and cover indigene literatures (Australian Aboriginal, Maori, First Nations) and regional creativity in West, East and South Africa, the Caribbean, India and the South-East Asian diaspora, and the settler colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Authors treated within broader frameworks include Chinua Achebe, 'Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Bole Butake, Shashi Deshpande, Louis Esson, Lorna Goodison, Patricia Grace, Bland Holt, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rita Kleinhart, Hanif Kureishi, Werewere Liking, Timothy Mo, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Ruby Slipperjack. There are self-testimonies from the writers Geoff Goodfellow, Darrelyn Gunzburg and Don Mattera, poems by David Dabydeen, Geoff Goodfellow and Olive Senior. Of particular value to this collection are the perspectives offered by African, Caribbean and Eastern European contributors.

The articles in this collection are representative of the criticism that has followed Walcott's career from the 1940s into the 1990s. Ten entries by Walcott himself (including one not previously published and two vital interviews) are complemented by some 40 incisive essays and reviews, ranging from professional assessments to the rare, personal observations of Walcott's earliest mentors.

John Thieme here provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginnings in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts--Caribbean, European and other--that have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for students and readers coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time.