Four Caribbean Women Playwrights

"This is a ground-breaking study of a rich but very much under-researched corpus. It lucidly foregrounds the particularity of Caribbean women writers' experiences and perspectives while also offering insightful and innovative analyses of the various theatrical techniques they employ. In so doing it makes an invaluable contribution to both Caribbean studies and theatre studies."

Prof. Jane Hiddleston, University of Oxford, UK

Four Caribbean Women Playwrights aims to expand Caribbean and postcolonial studies beyond fiction and poetry by bringing to the fore innovative women playwrights from the French Caribbean: Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, Suzanne Dracius. Focussing on the significance of these women writers to the French and French Caribbean cultural scenes, the author illustrates how their work participates in global trends within postcolonial theatre. The playwrights discussed here all address socio-political issues, gender stereotypes, and the traumatic slave and colonial pasts of the Caribbean people. Investigating a range of plays from the 1980s to the early 2010s, including some works that have not yet featured in academic studies of Caribbean theatre, and applying theories of postcolonial theatre and local Caribbean theatre criticism, Four Caribbean Women Playwrights should appeal to scholars and students in the Humanities, and to all those interested in the postcolonial, the Caribbean, and contemporary theatre.

Vanessa Lee is an academic and playwright. She was trained at Trinity College Dublin, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the University of Oxford, and has held postdoctoral positions at Linnaeus University and St Andrews University. She has published widely on theatre, gender, and issues of diversity in casting.