Countering Post-9/11 Stereotypes: Arab American Playwrights Make Their Voices Heard

Before 9/11Arab-American drama was sporadic and inconsistent in the sense that there was a relative absence of Arab-American theater or playwrights who made their voices heard across the USA. However, after 9/11 the American theater scene witnessed a surge of Arab-American drama and theater that aimed at addressing the American audience in order to voice the concerns, fears and anxieties of Arab Americans. They wanted to dispel much of the stereotype attributes which have been wrongly associated with them because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This study intends to examine the dramatic endeavors of Arab-American playwrights to make their voices heard through drama, performance and theater in light of transnationalism and diaspora theory. The study argues that Arab-American dramatists and theater groups write back to the hegemonic polemics against Arabs and Muslims, which has madly become characteristic of contemporary American literature and media following 9/11. Viewed in light of the anti-Arab American literary discourse, Arab-American playwrights and performers have taken giant steps towards changing the stereotypes of Arabs, and countering the loud voices of those who try to add fuel to the blazing flames of Islamophobia. To assess the contribution of Arab-American dramatists and performers to make their voices heard loud and clear in countering the stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, Yussef El Guindi (1960-) is going to be discussed in this paper because he has been fighting the stereotypes of Arab Americans and Islamophobia in his drama and theater. El Guindi has devoted most of his plays to fight the stereotypes that are persistently attributed to Arabs and Muslims, and his drama presents issues relating to identity formation and what it means to be Arab American. A scrutiny of his plays shows that El Guindi has dealt with an assortment of topics and issues all relating to the stereotypes of Arab Americans and the Middle East. These issues include racial profiling and surveillance; stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in the cinema and theater; and acculturation and clash of cultures. Keywords: Arab American, Identity, Theater, Stereotypes, Diaspora, Acculturation

The Theatre of Historical Revision: An Analysis of the Native American Drama Tradition

We attempt to analyse the form and content of major Native American plays to discuss their relationship with the traditional English drama and its content. By looking at plays of key Native American playwrights, we show that the Native American tradition goes against the English tradition of drama in its form by challenging the unities of time and place and characterization. It also brings in elements of Native American tradition of storytelling such as the blend of the sacred and the profane, the use of humor, the attitude towards facticity, to the tradition of drama to carve out a unique space for itself through which it attempts to challenge the dominant narratives of history, Native American culture, and at the same time highlight the problems the Native American nations face currently.

Schooling the Souls of the Savages: Theme of Negative Stereotyping in Native American Play

The present article deals with the theme of negative stereotyping in the backdrop of identity and representation in Native American drama with special reference to Scott Momaday's The Indolent Boys, The Moon in Two Windows, and Howe & Gordon's Indian Radio Days. By assuming an explicit postcolonial angle, these plays consciously subvert the project of negative stereotyping of the natives by employing the ideological vocabulary of the mainstream Euro-American discourse. In this way, the native American drama has become a significant site of deconstructing the binary of 'us' and 'them' by reversing the logic of imperialism and by resisting against the exploitative history of colonization.

Intimations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Faltering Voices of the Precariat in Annie Baker’s The Flick

While much critical attention as been devoted to the representation of precarity on the European stages, and in British theatre in particular, dramatic texts produced in the United States that concern, depict and represent the lives of members of the so-called precariat have barely been the object of critical scrutiny. This article traces the emergence of a growing concern with economic hardship in the second decade of the twenty-first century in American drama and presents a case study of Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013). Baker’s play is illustrative of an aesthetics of precarity that refrains from victimizing the members of the precariat and that plays out the paradoxes of scenarios of precarity as being at once troubling and enabling transformation and visions of possibility.

Schooling the Souls of the Savages: Theme of Negative Stereotyping in Native American Play

The present article deals with the theme of negative stereotyping in the backdrop of identity and representation in Native American drama with special reference to Scott Momaday's The Indolent Boys, The Moon in Two Windows, and Howe & Gordon's Indian Radio Days. By assuming an explicit postcolonial angle, these plays consciously subvert the project of negative stereotyping of the natives by employing the ideological vocabulary of the mainstream Euro-American discourse. In this way, the native American drama has become a significant site of deconstructing the binary of 'us' and 'them' by reversing the logic of imperialism and by resisting against the exploitative history of colonization.

The Iceman Cometh (1939) is the Representation of the Social Problems by Eugene O’ Neill: Modern American Drama

The main aim of this paper is to trace the social problems in The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill. The social issues are the pipe dream and hopelessness of man in American family and society. These social problems leads to tragic issues. The researcher is going to use the socialism theory by Karl Marx to tackle social issues (the hopelessness of man and the pipe dream) to present the tragic problems. The analysis of data will be qualitative approach and the technique is interpretive as storytelling type. The data is collected by the textual method. In the analysis and discussions part, the researcher will use the play (The Iceman Cometh) as the main idea of analysing. In conclusion, the findings will be analysed the speech of the characters in the play such as the actions of the plot, setting, and characters. This study will contribute/ add to academic, social, cultural, and literary in modern American drama. For example, literary contribution will be generalized as new study about the social problems in O’Neill’s plays. This study adds the literary background to modern American drama.

Linguoaxiosphere of Society and Personality in American Drama Discourse

The article presents the results of the study devoted to the linguistic axiological analysis of the XXI century American drama discourse. Contemporary drama discourse, due to its special linguistic status, is a space for verbal representation of characters’ individual axiological trajectories, the analysis of which contributes to determining the values, which are relevant for society as a whole. The aim of the study is to systematize the dynamic structural and content elements of drama characters’ personal axiological spheres and to define their involvement in the piece of social value paradigm, which has its linguistic reflection in modern American drama. The empirical research is based on the texts of the plays written by American playwrights in 2015-2020. Individual linguistic axiological spheres are examined in terms of flexible hierarchical structures, the dynamism of which is determined by the characters’ life experience. The method of linguistic axiological interpretation based on the combination of axiological analysis and discourse analysis is applied to show that the structure of individual linguistic axiological spheres presented in the contemporary American drama discourse is a simplified version of the social linguistic axiological sphere; it has fewer value dominants and evaluative vectors while preserving the diversity of linguistic means of evaluative representation. Linguistic marking of characters’ individual axiological spheres occurs with the help of evaluative utterances, which include evaluative lexemes. Their frequency is characterized by quantitative and qualitative fluctuations in the speech of different communicants and is predetermined by the evaluative potential of the word semantics. In American drama discourse, the individual axiological sphere has a linguistic representation not only in personal evaluative remarks, but also in the personage’s reaction to other people’s value judgments, as well as in the utterances where the object of evaluation is the character himself/herself. The discrepancy between the content-based evaluative vectors or the difference in the position of personal value dominants within individual linguistic axiological hierarchies can lead to communication failures. As a result of the linguistic axiological interpretation of individual linguistic axiological trajectories, represented in American dramatic discourse of the XXI century, a fragment of the current American social linguistic axiological sphere is identified, and the central value dominants are highlighted.