One of the most outstanding Native American authors, Diane Glancy’s literary outputs across multiple genres have often been the result of a tensional negotiation of her marginalized location. By consciously turning to the past, her characters often find the scope for healing and survival within the context of their sociocultural experiences. In her drama, she attempts to create a dramatic space for the emergence of various voices which are often marginalized. Hence, in addition to the various innovative strategies for staging the narratives, Glancy turns to the personal and the generational past in order to initiate the process of recovery and survival. Therefore, memory plays a crucial role in creating and engendering the process of healing. When the personal and the generational are intertwined with the sociocultural collisions, interesting possibilities are engendered for the development of the narratives. In a seemingly postmodernist discourse employed in her plays, memory acts as a controlling force. This paper attempts to examine the crucial role played by memory in the sourcing and construction of Glancy’s plays, which have for their ultimate aim, the creation of a space for voices and stories to emerge.

Diane Glancy’s plays integrate aspects of postmodernist discourse like de-structuring of the text, the constant play of meanings, the disparate fragmentary experiences, and the blurring of boundaries between reality and artifice, with Native American traditions of storytelling. Such a mode of work enables her to open new areas for intrusion of meaning, while negotiating a space for survival. The movement in her plays is towards a destination of understanding, which assumes the framework of a conflation of crossroads in different perspectives1 rather than a resolution of conflicts. Hence, while her works involve radical experimentation in drama and performance, coupled with an integration of Native American dramaturgical elements, her artistic focus is on finding modes for survival and healing in the realm of art and performance. In such an endeavor, memory acts as a controlling force, especially with reference to the following aspects of playwriting: sourcing personal and generational narratives; and influencing the structural patterns.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.