Hegemony and domination in South African drama in the Mid-20th Century: 1940-1960

Abstract

Studies in the evolution and development of post-colonial African cultural and dramatic forms have provided a range of interesting insights into the permutations of hybridization, accommodation and resistance that have characterised African drama since the advent of colonialism. As numerous and varied as these insights have been, most of them fall within the ambits of post-colonial theory in that they interrogate some of the ways by which African drama has sought to challenge or to accommodate the dominant discourses of Western drama and theatre. This paper extends existing discourses of post-colonial African theatre, combining these with the theory of hegemony in order to demonstrate the unexplored intersections between African language drama, European language drama and the racially and culturally divisive policies of apartheid South Africa during the mid-20^th Century. It analyses these developments as the continuation of a tripartite struggle for hegemony and domination between intrusive colonialist discourses, apartheid racial and cultural policies and the resilience of African dramatic forms. The central argument of the paper is that the continued existence of African language drama at the periphery of South African drama scholarship today is a direct result of a combination of the work of white liberal institutions and the consolidation of apartheid racial and cultural policies after 1948.