Three multiracial American women playwrights of trans-cultural consciousness: Adrienne Kennedy, Velina H. Houston, and Diane Glancy

This study aims at investigating the crucial political and cultural factors, most intensively the response to ethnicity, race, and gender that shape the identity of contemporary multicultural women playwrights of hybridized races and/or ethnicities in the United States. My argument is that these women's quest for their own identities is of a very unique and sophisticated nature due to the complexity of the hybrid texture of the American society, shackled above all by Euro-centric hegemony and a deeply-rooted racialized type of thinking. The highly capitalistic nature of that culture also promotes colonial codes of race, ethnicity, and gender.;The struggle of multiracial or multicultural women to fit into their capitalistic patriarchal Euro-centric macro-culture or any other exclusive microculture within that macro-culture, thus, is absolutely the most difficult and the most unguaranteed procedure in Western societies. This is simply so, because these multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, multilingual, and/or multicultural women have to confront all types of prejudices (racism, sexism, and monoculturalism) at the same time. Therefore, I argue that these hybrid women suffer from a triple colonization (racial, patriarchal, and monocultural).;To support this argument, plays of three contemporary hybrid American women playwrights will be discussed in my thesis. These women are Adrienne Kennedy (African-European-American), Velina Hasu Houston (Asian-African-Native-American), and Diane Glancy (Native-European-American). The three plays to be analyzed here are Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy, 1964), Tea (Houston, 1983), and The Truth Teller (Glancy, 1993). Other plays written by these three playwrights will also be briefly discussed.;Tackling the above factors that shape the identities of these three playwrights will lead me to include some critical cultural and dramatic studies as a significant background to this research in my introductory chapter. The three plays, after all, are to be analyzed to challenge the monolithic cultural logic of patriarchal Euro-centric America.;The melting process only produces a monolithic hegemony that melts different people in one but unequal pot. Multiculturalism or trans-culturalism, however, is to transcend all cultural boundaries and appreciate different human experiences, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or any other boundary. Kennedy, Houston, and Glancy, this thesis indicates, are American playwrights of trans-cultural consciousness and goals.