Enacting Nature: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Performance

In the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century, interculturally sensitive understandings of nature, place, and environment are essential for the development of a planetary community.
Acknowledging that the future of humankind is global, this volume explores the multi-faceted semantics of ecology in contemporary Indigenous theater and performance.
Focusing on works by such eminent Indigenous artists as Tomson Highway, Drew Hayden Taylor, Marie Clements, Yvette Nolan, Kevin Loring, Wesley Enoch, Hone Kouka, Briar Grace-Smith, and Witi Ihimaera, the volume brings together a spectrum of ecological perspectives from Europe, North America, and Oceania.
By tracing the multiple Indigenous configurations of the relationships between humans and their environment, the essays collected in Enacting Nature offer contributions to the fields of comparative Indigenous Studies, performance studies, and ecocriticism alike.

Birgit Däwes is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Vienna. She specializes in Native North American literatures and cultures. Next to a monograph study on Native North American Theater in a Global Age (2007) and the recent collection, Indigenous North American Drama. A Multivocal History (2013), she has also published a study on fiction as a mode of cultural memory: Ground Zero Fiction. History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel (2011).
Marc Maufort is Professor of English, American and postcolonial literatures at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium). He has written and (co)-edited several books on O’Neill as well as on postcolonial and multi-ethnic drama, including Transgressive Itineraries. Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism (2003), and Labyrinth of Hybridities. Avatars of O’Neillian Realism in Multi-ethnic American Drama (1972-2003) (2010).