Dr. Birgit Daewes (University of Wurzburg) 系列演講
1. 講者：Dr. Birgit Daewes
Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin auf Zeit) at the American Studies
Department, University of Würzburg）
講題：Contemporary Native North American Drama: An Introduction to the Genre
時間：97 年 1 月 3 日（四） 下午 3:00
地點：中興大學綜合教學大樓 7 樓 704 室
Indigenous drama is both the oldest and most innovative, the most misrepresented and
resistant American genre. For centuries, plays about, not by, Native Americans have
dominated the production of History and cultural memory, catering to the unremitting
colonialist desire for an exotic Other; a desire that Hartmut Lutz has termed "Indianthusiasm."
Thus, practices of "playing Indian" (Philip Deloria) have dislodged sovereign indigenous
performance and lastingly diffused the terminology of Native American theater. Against these
"indian media simulations" (Gerald Vizenor), indigenous theater artists in both the U.S. and
Canada have developed subversive strategies in order to reaffirm Native identities on stage, to
play back the cultural imaginary of the "McIndian" (James Luna), and—not least—to disrupt
the "ethnostalgic" gaze (Louis Owens). This lecture will investigate the reasons for the
century-long displacement of Native theater and suggest a methodology to approach this
fascinating genre. Providing a survey of Native North American performance along both
historical and contemporary lines, I will introduce the major movements, centers, and
playwrights. Within this framework, examples from dramatic works by LeAnne Howe, Roxy
Gordon, and Bruce King will illustrate the specific techniques by which the sign of the stage
indian is recovered from colonialist surveillance.
Dr. Daewes 在台系列演講摘要
2.講題：Native American Landscapes on Canvas and Stage
Our time, as Homi Bhabha has argued, is a "moment of transit where space and time cross to
produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside,
inclusion and exclusion." In our increasingly globalized world, coordinates of land, landscape,
home, and nation, as well as the temporal axis of historical heritage no longer constitute static
entities but are continuously reshaped by acts of contact, border crossings, intercultural
dialogue and exchange. For Native North American cultures, however, space and time have
always been central coordinates for the construction of human identity, and continue to play
major roles in psychological, social, political, aesthetic and spiritual discourses.
With examples from Native American visual art and performance, this lecture will explore the
multiple dimensions of indigenous landscapes in the twenty-first century. Using canvases,
stages, museums, and outdoor settings, painters (such as Michael Kabotie or Dan Namingha),
playwrights (such as Tomson Highway), and performance artists (such as James Luna) map
what Katja Sarkowsky calls "alterNative spaces"—landscapes which contest linear and
hierarchical notions of place and time. Eventually, as I will argue, these new topographies
also sketch alternative models of human identity, since they simultaneously allow for notions
of rootedness, belonging, and home, on the one hand, and the more dynamic, shifting notions
of "global flow" (Arjun Appadurai), on the other.
3.講題：Remembering 9/11 in Literature and Film: Transnational Approaches to Ground
Zero
When two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, the world
was torn between two impressions: On the one hand, what was broadcast on TV—uncannily
uniting spectators around the globe—was strangely familiar; it seemed as if we had seen those
images before. Movies like Independence Day and The Sum of All Fears were recalled, and
analogies were drawn to Oklahoma City or Pearl Harbor. On the other hand, this was an
entirely new dimension of violence on American ground: no previous terrorist attack had had
this kind of impact on the Western world. The event was soon considered to mark the end of
an era; and the beginning of the 21st century. While journalists struggled to comment on the
"indescribable event" (Marianne Hirsch) and personal experiences dominated the memory,
fiction writers and film directors were at a loss for words. As Lynn Sharon Schwartz
summarized it, "we are very tired of our stories, but we don't know what the next sentence
should be."
Six years after the terrorist attacks, this silence has been broken. Many novels, short stories,
plays, and films have been published which directly address 9/11. Entering the space of the
unspeakable through text, works by Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Fr d ric
Beigbeder, Nick McDonell, Art Spiegelman, Martin Amis, Claire Messud, Philip Beard, John
Updike, Don DeLillo, and many others not only provide fictional re-enactments necessary for
cultural catharsis and healing but they negotiate the contact zones of individual and collective
identity, documentary and fiction, and of the national and global impact that informs our
(re)construction of September 11. This lecture will introduce some of these reactions, from
both the U.S. and Europe, in order to illustrate the many ways by which literature and film
contribute to our collective memory of 9/11. It will also raise questions about aesthetics in a
traumatic context: can (and may) art frame this kind of event, and thus link terror to the
beautiful?