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National Identity and Post-Nationalism in Contemporary Scottish Drama: Focusing on David Greig’s Europe

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2011, 24(1), pp.5-27
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

KIM, YOO 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Scottish drama emerging in the 1990s, dubbed often as ‘post-devolution plays’, can be defined as post-nationalist plays in the sense that they share the desire to investigate the boundaries of the nation-state. Employing a variety of motifs such as travelling, border-crossing and borderland encounter, they attempt to move beyond a narrow sense of Scottishness. They focus on differences ‘within’ Scotland, challenging the conventions of Scottish nationalistic plays, which thrived on anti-colonialism and parochialism. A sense of flexible identities and displacement are two dominant traits of contemporary Scottish drama within the new contexts of post-1989 Europe and the rapid expansion of globalization. What Greig’s plays share is a sense of displacement, which is caused by the disconnecting of the association between culture and place. Greig sets his plays in “non-place,” such as airport, shopping malls, hotels and refuge camps. In contrast to familiar, organic and localized anthropological “places”, these anonymous and functional “non-places” become associated with the mobile, hybrid subjectivities. In Europe(1994), a forgotten railway station in an unnamed border town becomes a battleground for the dynamic interaction among nationalism, global capitalism and border-crossing. The railway station is a typical example of “non-place”, a symbol of connections where the individual can experience Otherness. However, Greig does not present a performative act of border-crossing as an idealized, metaphorical locus of a new hybridity, which tends to overlook the real conditions of the border. The play insists that border-crossing is not a luxury, but a matter of life and death in a contested space where ethnic nationalism continuously competes with transnational capitalism.

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