Black, white Chicana/o, and Asian American artists within the avant-garde theater movement shared similar interests in popular theatrical forms, particularly satire and farce, as well as nonnaturalist and often non -European dramatic norms that emphasized gesture, ritual and spectacle over plot and character development– Edward Smethurst “Bandung World . . .” 264
Well, this has been quite a week! I heard that the Friday session was quite exciting. Thanks again to Tiana and
Richard Wright’s essays reporting on the 1955 Bandung Conference: “They were getting a new sense of themselves, getting used to new roles and new identities.”
Sydnie for leading the group whike I was across the street talking about race and the seventeenth century stage. When I put together the syllabus, I had grouped several BAM-linked phenomena through the rubric “Decolonization,” perhaps because when I was writing it, I was thinking about how the decolonization movements of the 50s, particularly the 1955 Bandung Conference, an Afro-Asian conference of 29 African and Asian nations that excluded the Western powers, set the stage for the Black Power Movement and other liberation movements.