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Tricia Hopton Tricia Hopton i(A149701 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 Telling the Self, Splitting the Self : Identity Construction in Canadian and Australian Multicultural Theatre Tricia Hopton , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , no. 59 2011; (p. [172]-178) 'This article considers how Canadian and Australian multicultural theatre explores notions of individual identity in conjunction with issues of national and cultural identity. I use two plays as test studies - Sunil Kuruvilla's Rice Boy (2000) from Canada and Noelle Janaczewska's "Cold Harvest" (1998) from Australia - to analyse the dramaturgical and theatrical techniques employed to undermine prescriptive identity roles that have developed in both postcolonial nations.
The complex nature of cultural identity in these two multicultural nations is brought to the fore and identity is shown theatrically to be an intricate process, as opposed to the simplified, pre-existing subject positions, which I term the "imaginary citizenry".
The plays illustrate two strategies for challenging the imaginary citizen roles. The first mode is dramaturgical: the characters construct their own identities in a narratie mode. Employing Paul Ricoeur's concept of identity as a narrative process, the characters can be read as possessing the agency to tell, and re- tell, the stories of their lives in an effort to determine a workable sense of self. This, in turn, enables the second, theatrical mode through which identity is shown to be a constructive process: split subjectivity.
Through the process of self-narration the characters' personas are split and they shift they become versions of themselves at different ages, embody other characters altogether, or even perform a kind of self-doubling, in which they both act and observe themselves in certain situations. These fluid shifts in time, space and character allow the audience to witness a physical manifestation of the self-narration that enables the characters' self-understanding. Together, with both the dramaturgical and theatrical strategies in mind, these plays provide opportunities to broaden understandings about cultural, national and individual identity; they provide a forum through which to consider rethinking the ways in which official multiculturalism actually operates in Australia and Canada.' Tricia Hopton.
1 y separately published work icon Pockets of Change : Adaptation and Cultural Transition Tricia Hopton (editor), Jane Stadler (editor), Peta Mitchell (editor), Adam Atkinson (editor), Lanham : Lexington Books , 2011 6535614 2011 anthology criticism

'The twelve essays collected in Pockets of Change locate adaptation within a framework of two overlapping, if not simultaneous, creative processes: on the one hand, adaptation is to be understood as an acknowledged transposition of an existing source-that is, the process of adapting from; on the other hand, adaption is also a process of purposeful shifting and evolving of creative practices in response to external factors, including but not limited to other creative works-in other words, the process of adapting to. This book explores adaptation, then, as an active practice of repetition and as a reactive process of development or evolution. The essays also extend beyond the production, transformation, and interpretation of texts to interrogate the values and practices at work in cultural transition and transformation during periods of social and historical change. Collectively, the papers theorize adaptation by taking on three tasks: first, to examine the conditions under which the two processes of adaptation operate; second, to give an account of the space and moment in which the processes unfold (the 'pockets' of the title); and finally, to examine what emerges from pockets of adaptation. While adapting from and adapting to are both processes that appear to preclude innovation in the way that they acknowledge and depend on external sources, Pockets of Change demonstrates that adaptation is productive. It not only references prior texts, attitudes, practices and media, but it also invites us to re-visit the past and to re-think the present in new ways, potentially giving narrative space to muted or occluded voices. This book therefore brings together an innovative and varied range of approaches to, interpretations and uses of adaptation, challenging the assumption that an adaptation is simply either a 're-make' or the act of turning one medium into another. Adaptation, then, names not only the means by which texts are transformed, but also the space in which that transformation takes place. This anthology highlights the processes of adaptation and transition rather than simply focusing on the relationship between beginning and end products. In identifying these pockets of change this anthology both claims and opens up new spaces in this critical field and mode of textual analysis. ' (Back Cover)
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