My paper will examine the critical reception of Jessica by Linda Griffiths
and Maria Campbell. I will look at the social, historical, and political
context of the play in order to address the conditions that framed its
critical reception. My paper asks, what kinds of meanings did the critics
of that time ascribe to the categories of gender and race? Jessica was
produced several times from the early to mid-1980s, during a period when
questions of gender, ethnicity and race became increasingly important to
a new generation of theatre artists. A newly emerging discourse of “identity
politics” served as an anchor for the formation of this new wave of theatre
in Canada. I plan to discuss both the benefits and shortcomings of this
discourse by looking closely at how it informs critical responses to Jessica.
I compare these responses to the ideas raised by Griffiths and Campbell
in The Book of Jessica. I argue that The Book of Jessica, which was published
in 1989, opens up a new understanding of identity which problematizes the
meanings assigned to the categories of gender and race by critics who reviewed
Jessica.
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