The Past in the Present in Black Canadian Drama: A Study of Lorena Gale’s Angelique, George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy, George Boyd’s Consecrated Ground and Andrew Moodie’s Riot

Situated within the mainstream Canadian history, race and black culture and their concomitants of dislocation, eraser, rape, violence, capture, torture and death, this paper adopts the postcolonial approach to discuss Lorena Gale’s Angelique, George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy, George Boyd’s Consecrated Ground and Andrew Moodie’s Riot. The main objective is to trace their dramatic writings’ constant search for alternative spaces for the dismemebered, the dislocated, the uprooted and the oppressed. Via their literary imagination, the playwrights adopted the dramatic narratives, stage dream-like imagery, and humorous scenes to discuss serious issues. Cultural memory, adaptations and juxtaposition devices are vehicles to map the Blacks’ past and present traumatic experiences. As plays of resistance, of refusal and of anger, their targets are to speak on behalf of the ‘othered’ and of the oppressed; implementing the historical dialectic and the psychoanalytic approach for the treatment of alienation, forced assimilation, racial discrimination andthe self/other relationship. This is discursively done via cosmic manifestations of black slavery with the aim of conflating the personal with the collective along with the transhistorical without challenging the boundaries.