A Post-Imperialist Glance at People’s Self-Image in the 21st Century Britain: A Case Study of Stephenson’s play, Enlightenment

It seems that in the second half of the twentieth century, post-imperialist discourse was divided into two distinct but interrelated branches. The first branch deals with the reactions of the oppressed/‘other’ people to the dominant culture, literature, and attitudes of the colonizers that, in fact, dates back to previous centuries, although it changed course and thrust after the 1970s with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). The second branch involves the reactions of the artists and writers of the dominant countries, e.g., Caryl Churchill and Howard Brenton in England, who began to criticize the imperialistic nature of their own countries after 1968 ‘events’ in Europe and America, a watershed for various, new works of art. In modern English drama, one could find exemplary dramas of British writers that, deploying a post-imperialist approaches, guard against the cultural arrogance and literary hegemony of Great Britain. To dismantle the dominant modes of culture and to give birth to a new consciousness, these new dramas shun away from Aristotelian drama whose principles of Mimesis and Catharsis were misused by the mainstream theatres of the dominant countries to establish their own self-image as racially and cultural superior people. These modern dramas reflect the attitudes of strata of the British society who have come to believe that for centuries Great Britain has tried to have cultural hegemony over nations through the legitimation of slavery and oppressing political activists in the native countries. These dramas challenge the hegemony of Great Britain and attempt to reconstruct the domestic culture of their people(s). Hence, the heroes in these post-imperialist dramas often adopt a new identity in their post-imperialist cultures and/or communities. The present article tries to illustrate how Shelaugh Stephenson negotiates such issues with her compatriots in her plays Mappa Mundi and Enlightenment.