Most of humanity’s recorded history has been indelibly marked by armed conflicts in various places around the world, yet the scale and effect of the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century were unprecedented. Both wars remapped the geography, politics, economies, and consciousness of prior realities, and echoed deafeningly throughout the modern works of literature of diverse nations. Anglophone literature overtly portrays wartime atrocities and human ordeals, and concurrently raises awareness of, and agitates against, the savagery of warfare. It does so through its poignant Trench Poetry, the anti-war novels of the Lost Generation, dramas of the Holocaust, and theater of genocide, among others. Another, relatively recent, a subgenre of Anglophone drama also addresses the subject of armed conflicts and their consequences, although its critics and reviewers mostly focus on identity politics, minority and ethnic studies, and the mix of ideas and images that are features of Asian-American theater. Within it researchers can find arresting examples of how an English-speaking theater represents conflict-induced displacement and migration and other repercussions of the Second World War, while dealing with one of the most discomfiting events in recent US history. This paper examines Wakako Yamauchi’s representation of the state-controlled relocation of Asian-American citizens and their consequent experiences, in her play 12-1-A; and Velina Hasu Houston’s portrayal of the Second World War’s ideological and socio-economic repercussions in the Japanese community, in Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken).

Starting from the premise that contemporary crisis is a pervasive continuation of the modern “series of interrelated crises” (Fernández-Caparrós and Brígido-Corachán vii), this article examines the manner in which the US theater has responded to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously considering crises as “agents of change and transformation” (xvii) and bearing in mind the #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements, the article questions the likelihood of contemporary American theater overcoming its own crisis of representation. Relating modern and current crises, the essay first outlines twentieth century dramatic literature and theatersi against the backdrop of the World Wars, the 1918 health crisis, economic depression, and post-war (racialized) society, focusing on plays by American women of color. The study then centers on dramatic and theatrical developments brought about by the annus horribilis of 2020, surveying new genres, authors and performances, and discerning no significant improvement in systemic discrimination on Broadway stages. The essay also offers complementary reading of Trouble in Mind (1955), a meta-drama mirroring systemic racial and gender discrimination in American theaters, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) which unravels similar issues, albeit in the film industry.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this paper analyses power play, speech strategies, and speech impact in Harold Pinter’s one-act play Mountain Language (1988), in which prison officials exercise power over inmates and their visitors through various tactics of control and subjugation. The paper’s methodological framework of corpus analysis is founded upon the linguistic features of police speak in the English language (a hybrid genre of spoken language police officers use when interrogating suspects), which, we propose, permeates the discourse in Mountain Language. The paper first reflects on discourses on/of power as observed in literary theory, then examines discursive strategies in the play, to illustrate speech impact caused by “conduct-regulating persuasion” and linguistic features of verbal violence. It also reflects on the concept of the persuasive power of discourse, in terms of the impact it may have on the mindset and behaviour of the interlocutor(s).