Deconstructing master narratives through cognitive games in Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian, Foghorn, and 49
Abstract
We discuss Geiogamah’s dramatic depiction of the evolving train of thought within the indigenous society through a joined study of his Body Indian, Foghorn, and 49—three full-length, independent works. Application of cognitive poetics strategies highlights the potential within these plays to enlighten the immediate past and contemporary indigenous society and illustrates how storytelling functions as a resuscitating tool within indigenous communities. If read together as a trilogy, these plays reveal Geiogamah’s artistic maneuvers: having depicted the historical trauma which has afflicted the contemporary indigenous society through the textual actual world of Body Indian, he exposes the long-established ideologies at work for Indigenous peoples’ subjugation through spatio-temporal re-locations and ‘conceptual blends’ in Foghorn and, finally, puts forward a sketch of the ideal indigenous possible world in 49. © 2021, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.