Subversion versus inversion: the loss of the carnivalesque in Janet Suzman’s The Free State
Abstract
According to Gilbert and Thompkins (1996: 5), postcolonial drama is aimed at
dismantling the hierarchies and determinants that create binary oppositions in
postcolonial contexts and – according to Young (2001: 4) – also actively transforming
the present “out of the clutches of the past”. This dismantling can, however,
only occur when the inevitable ambivalence of postcolonial binaries are taken into
account (Gilbert & Thompkins 1996: 6). In her text The Free State (2000a), Janet
Suzman attempts to appropriate Chekhov’s dismantling of power structures in The
Cherry Orchard (1904) within the South African context. However, although The
Free State is written against the former apartheid regime, it fails to dismantle the
hierarchies within its context because it negates the vital carnivalesque subversion
of Chekhov’s text. Instead of subverting the hierarchies in her context, Suzman
merely inverts them. In this article, the concept of the carnival as developed by
Mikhail Bakhtin is used to investigate the significance of Suzman’s deviation in the
treatment of the hierarchies within the South African context.
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- Faculty of Humanities [2033]