Contemporary British Theatre and the Imaging of China: Poststructuralism, Dialectics, and the Shadow of Brecht

This volume is a continuation of the work begun in my 2017 Palgrave study Performing China on the London Stage: Chinese Opera and Global Power, 1759-2008, which sought to investigate how performance echoed the contraction of the Chinese and expansion of British Empires from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and their opposite movements across the twentieth century. This study interrogates the construction of China across several plays by white British playwrights where the
focus is on the political machinations of China (or, in the case of Howard Barker, where the play became politicised in performance). It focuses on original plays, exploring them through a methodology that connects Marxist dialectics, Brecht, negative dialectics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. It asks: can White playwrights meaningfully harness negative dialectical hybridity in their writing about China, or are they part of the imperialist problem?