Beyond the Rim? Redrawing Boundaries in Pacific Theatre

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which Pacific drama and theater contribute to the shaping of a perspective and a vision of a Pacific world ‘beyond the rim’, by attending to the cross-cultural conditions of the life of island societies themselves as well as their connections and engagement with globality at large. For this, I consider how plays by Pacific writers in text and performance stage and interpret such relations by drawing, negotiating, and redrawing boundaries, of gender and kinship, culture and language, tradition and modernity. Looking at examples from various parts of Oceania, I identify the social imaginaries they project and address their relevance to communities for which, as Joakim Peter has said of Chuuk islanders, the horizon “is no longer ‘out there’ [but] now at home”