Gender, Authenticity, and Diasporic Identities in Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic and Iizuka’s 36 Views

Authors

Ellen Moll

Abstract

British playwright Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey and U.S. playwright Naomi Iizuka’s 36 Views both feature women who become, perform as, or otherwise engage with women of distant time periods. Both plays use these connections between women across time periods to explore the intersectionality of race, nation, and gender. Moreover, these plays portray the past in ways that foreground the characters’ constant negotiations and re-negotiations of identity, and suggest that women in the present need new ways to engage with history in order to subvert and reclaim oppressive representations. Both plays also suggest that these engagements with history are vital to formulating ethical, historically aware, global and diasporic identities. Significantly, these plays repeatedly emphasize the “inauthenticity” of these representations of women of the past; engaging with the past is not a matter of direct access but a fraught and transformative process whereby one collaborates with women of the past to create new ways of formulating identity.

Recommended Citation

Moll, Ellen (2015) "Gender, Authenticity, and Diasporic Identities in Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic and Iizuka’s 36 Views," Comparative Drama: Vol. 49: Iss. 2, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol49/iss2/3