Kailin Wright - Böcker

In Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than updating popular narratives, adaptation informs understandings of culture, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as individual experiences. In Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre Kailin Wright investigates adaptations that retell popular stories with a political purpose and examines how they acknowledge diverse realities and transform our past. Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre explores adaptations of Canadian history, Shakespeare, Greek mythologies, and Indigenous history by playwrights who identify as English-Canadian, African-Canadian, French-Canadian, French, Kuna Rappahannock, and Delaware from the Six Nations. Along with new considerations of the activist potential of popular Canadian theatre, this book outlines eight strategies that adaptors employ to challenge conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous, Black, queer, or female. Recent cancellations of theatre productions whose creators borrowed elements from minority cultures demonstrate the need for a distinction between political adaptation and cultural appropriation. Wright builds on Linda Hutcheon's definition of adaptation as repetition with difference and applies identification theory to illustrate how political adaptation at once underlines and undermines its canonical source. An exciting intervention in adaptation studies, Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre unsettles the dynamics of popular and political theatre and rethinks the ways performance can contribute to how one country defines itself.

No Mother, No Future investigates how theatre and performance use pregnancy loss to represent a lost future. Spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book analyzes performances that challenge dominant cultural scripts linking motherhood with futurity and nationhood in Canada and the United States.Combining intersectional feminism with theories of reproductive justice and reproductive futurity, this work interrogates how pregnancy loss—especially when experienced by those excluded from white, heteronormative ideals of motherhood—is often portrayed as a societal failure. It examines reproductive loss not only as a dramatic device but also as a political reality shaped by systemic violence, including slavery, forced sterilization, and child welfare policies that disproportionately target Indigenous and Black communities. Through in-depth analyses and original interviews with playwrights, directors, and actors, this volume offers a critical framework for understanding how performance stages reproductive loss as a site of resistance.As the first book-length study of motherhood and reproduction in Canadian theatre, it is essential reading for scholars and students in theatre, performance studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and reproductive justice.