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Drama and the South African state

Book

Drama and the South African state

This book is part of a series that aims to situate culture of all kinds in its social, historical and political context and it discusses the reflection of political policies and social issues in South Africa in drama. The book deals mainly with those South African plays, in variants of English, that have been published. They are plays that are located within the South African social formation and that attempt to mirror or represent past or present history, to interrogate or explore it, in fictive or other terms. The book examines South African drama of the last five decades and discusses how, at the significant moments of South African dramatic activity, the subject, the land, the body and culture, amongst other concepts have been imagined or presented on stage and subsequently in playtext. The book is particularly concerned with the ways in which the plays contest prevailing apartheid discourse and the moments when such plays become subversive.