The Intimate Public of Closet Drama: Sentimentality in the work of Joanna Baillie and Rose Mbowa
Document Type
Presentation
Location
434 Hodges / Zoom Room A
Start Date
28-3-2025 11:40 AM
End Date
28-3-2025 12:00 PM
Description
As a pioneer Closet Dramatist of the nineteenth century, Joanna Baillie has been extensively studied and documented through publishing and extensive academic studies about her theatrical works. As a Ugandan political dramatist of the twentieth century, Rose Mbowa has not. Her work and her legacy are preserved in a handful of academic texts which cover large regional areas of Africa, and though they offer great insights, what survives as a tangible remnant of the author’s legacy is an eleven-page journal article titled Theatre and Political Oppression in Uganda. Both authors, Mbowa and Baillie, used their theatrical talents to engage in ‘rhetorical displays’ (Davis and Holland, 2015) which generated and disseminated thoughts and ideas alternative to those of the prevailing political and social hegemonies of their time.
Although the term Closet Drama is often ascribed to female writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has come to gain meaning in more modern fields of learning such Queer studies. I propose that Closet Drama may also apply to the work of artists like Rose Mbowa, who created miniature utopias in places of political strife, just as Joanna Baillie created religious safe havens during times of social restructuring. This study utilizes Lauren Berlant’s ideas in The Female Complaint to examine links between Joanna Baillie’s The Martyr and Rose Mbowa’s Mother Uganda and Her Children. Elements of sentimentality will be explored in the work of Baillie and Mbowa, with a dedicated focus on the former’s preface to The Martyr, and the latter’s script of Mother Uganda.
The Intimate Public of Closet Drama: Sentimentality in the work of Joanna Baillie and Rose Mbowa
434 Hodges / Zoom Room A
As a pioneer Closet Dramatist of the nineteenth century, Joanna Baillie has been extensively studied and documented through publishing and extensive academic studies about her theatrical works. As a Ugandan political dramatist of the twentieth century, Rose Mbowa has not. Her work and her legacy are preserved in a handful of academic texts which cover large regional areas of Africa, and though they offer great insights, what survives as a tangible remnant of the author’s legacy is an eleven-page journal article titled Theatre and Political Oppression in Uganda. Both authors, Mbowa and Baillie, used their theatrical talents to engage in ‘rhetorical displays’ (Davis and Holland, 2015) which generated and disseminated thoughts and ideas alternative to those of the prevailing political and social hegemonies of their time.
Although the term Closet Drama is often ascribed to female writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has come to gain meaning in more modern fields of learning such Queer studies. I propose that Closet Drama may also apply to the work of artists like Rose Mbowa, who created miniature utopias in places of political strife, just as Joanna Baillie created religious safe havens during times of social restructuring. This study utilizes Lauren Berlant’s ideas in The Female Complaint to examine links between Joanna Baillie’s The Martyr and Rose Mbowa’s Mother Uganda and Her Children. Elements of sentimentality will be explored in the work of Baillie and Mbowa, with a dedicated focus on the former’s preface to The Martyr, and the latter’s script of Mother Uganda.