From Roots to Routes: Women Playwrights Negotiating their Authorship in Paratexts

For a range of reasons, there has been a tendency to preach a dearth of interest in the ways writers assert their authorship, constructing individual and collective writerly identities to voice their authorial intentions. While some theoreticians and philosophers, evoking the ghost of biographical positivism, promoted anti-authorialism, postmodernity was immersed in intertextual studies. Though the announced death of the author assumed a significance matching the earlier death of God, the author returns as “writer,” scriptor or “function” in the writing of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, as the process of becoming (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) or as a performative concept (Gérard Genette, Erika Fischer-Lichte). The aim of the article is to examine a narrow selection of writing authored and co-authored by three women playwrights—Deborah Levy, Djanet Sears and Tanika Gupta—who set out to speak on why they write, aiming in that way to articulate their authorship in essays, notes and conversations which have the status of diverse paratextual forms. The article starts by exploring the relevance of discussions on authorship as well as the implications of institutional policies in regard to women writing for the theatre. Further on, on a tropological level, the article analyses the figurative rendering of self-reflection as a passage from roots to routes, from a concept of fixed identity to mobile, performative concepts converging on epistemological alertness and openness to recognising the ontology of writerly identity as becoming.