Performing Liminality in Elizabeth Wong's Letters to a Student Revolutionary (1996) and China Doll: The Imagined Life of an American Actress (2005), Betty Shamieh's Chocolate in Heat: Growing Up Arab in America (2001) and The Black Eyed (2008), and Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2005) and Tombs of the Vanishing Indian (2012) : A Comparative Study

Abstract

The research has applied the social drama theory of anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner of the rites of passage and the concept of liminality, as well as Homi Bhabha's hybridity theory to selected plays of the three playwrights: Betty Shamieh, Elizabeth Wong, and Marie Clements. This helped in highlighting the journey of the female ethnic women throughout their identity formation that is in the passage of transition. Moreover, the hybrid characters and their fragmentation and opening up a third space of possibilities have been analysed through Homi Bhabha's theories. Consequently, themes like loss of identity, fragmentation, death, rebirth, and re-initiation are all tackled and pinpointed in the plays understudy, as well as analysing the infused theatrical and aesthetic techniques used by the three playwrights. The thesis is divided into