Khairul Chowdhury

Empowering and Disempowering Indigenes: Staging Australian Aboriginal Experience Khairul Chowdhury

This study offers an exploration of the drama informing the Indigenous experiences, which contains Aboriginal people?s effort to attain a visible reality based on cultural and political rights. It is also a deeper understanding of the empowering and disempowering Indigenes in the discursive domain as well as in the existential reality. Though the study considers a large number of playtexts written by the Indigenous playwrights from 1970s to the present, it explores playtexts written by non- Indigenous playwrights as well. Here, the chief concern is to explore the discursive features of the texts, the items both linguistic and dramatic that tend to place or exclude Aboriginal people from discourses. The Aboriginal theatre movement started in the 1970s serves as the complete reconceptualisation of Aboriginality in terms of centering Aboriginal Identity and culture in the dominant discursive domain. Such an intervention may involve the recovery of Aboriginal history from the dominant history of Australia and infusing positive attributes to Indigenes? identity.