'This study offers an exploration of the drama which contains Aboriginal people's effort to attain a visible reality based on cultural and political rights. It is also a deeper understanding of the empowering and disempowering Indigenes in the discursive domain as well as in the existential reality.
'Though the study considers a large number of playtexts written by the Indigenous playwrights from 1970s to the present, it explores playtexts written by non-Indigenous playwrights as well. Here, the chief concern is to explore the discursive features of the texts, the items both linguistic and dramatic that tend to place or exclude Aboriginal people from discourses. Such a consideration may very well go beyond the periodic consideration of the plays.
'The Aboriginal theatre movement started in the 1970s serves as the complete reconceptualisation of Aboriginality in terms of centering Aboriginal Identity and culture in the dominant discursive domain. Such an intervention may involve the recovery of Aboriginal history from the dominant history of Australia and infusing positive attributes to Indigenes' identity. It also provides force in their existential reality. Freed from submission to the dominant's prescription, the drama appears as an alternative formula, but a rigorously vibrant medium of contestation in which history, identity, culture, politics and reality are endlessly expressive and persuasive.
'Keeping with the need to expose the complexity of the process of empowering and disempowering Indigenes, I read the discursive strategies employed in a selection of playtexts. The empowering drama adds dignity to Aboriginal people's gesture of friendship and goodwill and contrasts with the representation of aggressive colonial one. The drama exposes the encounter between negative and positive features in the representation of Aboriginality, thereby suggesting fighting against the authoritative design involves the representation of Indigenes in their terms.
'The most significant element the empowering drama contributes is its ability to capture the experience of the struggle of Indigenes to survive since colonisation. Aboriginal drama focuses more on the strategies to unsettle the dominant system than on the social order and the context.
'The final paradox is the act of inclusion and exclusion of Indigenes to/from the dominant theatrical discourses that indicate a fine line between empowerment and disempowerment.'
Empowering and Disempowering Indigenes : Staging Australian Aboriginal Experience
multi chapter work
