The first anthology of First Nations drama to be published in Canada, this volume includes seminal work by various authors, and also features previously unpublished plays.

Indigenous drama is at once the oldest and most innovative, the most heavily displaced and resistant American genre. Despite its increasing international presence over the past two decades, the field has so far been neglected by scholarship. This study seeks to chart the genre, in both the U.S. and Canada, by its contemporary manifestations from 1968 to 2004 and traces its historical entanglements in simulacral images and colonial surveillance. Placing particular emphasis on the fashioning of cultural identity, this approach situates Native theater in the larger framework of transnational methodologies. General questions of theatricality and representation are complemented by in-depth analyses of 25 plays by authors such as Hanay Geiogamah, Monica Charles, Gerald Vizenor, Spiderwoman Theater, Diane Glancy, Margo Kane, Tomson Highway, and Drew Hayden Taylor.

The conflict between the political and the personal, an opposition which pervades the whole of American Literature, informs the essays on twentieth-century American theater gathered in this volume. Prominent theater scholars from Europe and America address the cultural paradigm created by the clash of private needs with public expectations. The difficulty of reconciling the two has led many dramatists to turn to the complexities of intertextuality in order to express their rebellions and rejections of inherited cultural values and myths. Essays on Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Susan Glaspell, H.M. Koutoukas, Dolores Prida, or Suzan Lori-Parks (to name but a few of the dramatists discussed here) reflect the vibrancy of American drama and the depth of the interaction of the political with the personal. Contents: Barbara Ozieblo: Introduction: The Political and the Personal in American Drama - Brenda Murphy: Tennessee Williams and Cold-War Politics - Ana Anton-Pacheco: Coping with the Personal: Tennessee Williams's Minimalist Plays - Gary Harrington: The Smashed Mirror: Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire - Stuart Marlow: Interrogating The Crucible: Revisiting the Biographical, Historical and Political Sources of Arthur Miller's Play - Russell DiNapoli: Maxwell Anderson's Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset - Johan Callens: Going Public, Performing Stein - Cheryl Black/Robert K. Sarlos: On the Threshold of Sexual Politics in American Theater and Drama: The Provincetown Players - Marcia Noe: The New Woman in the Plays of Susan Glaspell - Marta Fernandez-Morales: The Two Spheres in Susan Glaspell's Trifles and The Verge - Karin Ikas: The Promise and the Reality of the American Dream inMexican-American Plays - Maria Luisa Ochoa-Fernandez: Weaving the Personal and the Political in Dolores Prida's Beautiful Senoritas, Coser y Cantar and Botanica - Mar Gallego: Redefining African-American Female Space: Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun and Ntozake Shange's for colored girls - Araceli Gonzalez-Crespan: Against - Ruby Lip and Saucy Curl: Breaking the Great Divide among Women in Beah Richards's A Black Woman Speaks - Stephen J. Bottoms: Untidying Her Passions: The Medea of H.M. Koutoukas - Antonia Rodriguez-Gago: Re-Creating Herstory: Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus - Claudia Barnett: - In Your Dreams : Deb Margolin's Fantasy/Drama - Felix Martin-Gutierrez: Fragments from the Political Unconscious in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays - La Vinia Delois Jennings: Reflection of Self as Other: Mimetic Parallels between Minstrelsy and Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities - Katherine Weiss: Sam Shepard's Family Trilogy: Breaking Down Mythical Prisons - Ines Cuenca-Aguilar: Representations of Women in Sam Shepard's Theater - N.J. Stanley: Screamingly Funny and Terrifyingly Shocking: Paula Vogel as Domestic Detective."

Coyote Anthropology shatters anthropology’s vaunted theories of practice and offers a radical and comprehensive alternative for the new century. Building on his seminal contributions to symbolic analysis, Roy Wagner repositions anthropology at the heart of the creation of meaning—in terms of what anthropology perceives, how it goes about representing its subjects, and how it understands and legitimizes itself. Of particular concern is that meaning is comprehended and created through a complex and continually unfolding process predicated on what is not there—the unspoken, the unheard, the unknown—as much as on what is there. Such powerful absences, described by Wagner as “anti-twins,” are crucial for the invention of cultures and any discipline that proposes to study them. As revealed through conversations between Wagner and Coyote, Wagner's anti-twin, a coyote anthropology should be as much concerned with absence as with presence if it is to depict accurately the dynamic and creative worlds of others. Furthermore, Wagner suggests that anthropologists not only be aware of what informs and conditions their discipline but also understand the range of necessary exclusions that permit anthropology to do what it does. Sly and enticing, probing and startling, Coyote Anthropology beckons anthropologists to draw closer to the center of all things, known and unknown.