Theatres of the National Imaginary: Economies, Spatial Politics, and Nation in French and American Theatre

Abstract

We in the artistic world today are faced with the exhausting impossibility that “political theatre” exists perhaps most visibly in the governments and politics of the world’s nations, rather than in a theatre and on a proper stage. "Theatres of the National Imaginary" explores, through an analysis of French and American theatre, how and why, in a world full of the contradictions of borders and globalization, immigration and refugee status, isolationism and massive migration movements, the surge of populism and a young neo-liberalism, “political theatre” has emerged as a fundamental artistic expression of national cultural identities and as a style of theatre that makes personal, local, and world drama readily legible to diverse audiences. In addition, the paper attempts to demonstrate how theatre remains a flexible, adaptive, immediate medium in the cultural world, one that defies extinction because of its fluidity, and indeed, one that is rapidly gaining cultural capital around the world as an artistic form with a singular potential for the representation of nation-ness and national identities.