Sarah MacKenzie
Panelist: (Re)casting Shakespeare in Canada
SARAH MACKENZIE currently teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Ottawa. She holds a PhD and M.A. in Feminist and Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa, as well as an undergraduate degree in Humanities from Carleton University. Her masters and doctoral work examined the ways Indigenous playwrights address the colonialist legacy of violence against women as it continues to play out in contemporary North American contexts. Her first book, Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada (Fernwood Publishing Company) furthers this research. She has taught Indigenous Studies at the University of New Brunswick, Sheridan College, and the University of Ottawa. So, too, has she taught Gender Studies and Literature. Her academic research interests include Indigenous theatre, postcolonial feminist theory, Canadian history, and Indigenous literatures. She has also been involved in several writing projects that relate to the roles of Indigenous women activists in Canadian history and the state surveillance of racialized activists. Broadly, her writing considers the way in which people come to define themselves in a “multicultural” space like Canada, focusing particularly upon redressing colonial violence by engaging with decolonial aesthetics. Sarah’s syncretic identity as the daughter of a Métis/Anishinaabe mother and a first-generation Scottish-immigrant father is integral to her role as a feminist, antiracist, academic, researcher, and critic. Her methods of interpretive analysis are thus founded upon a strong commitment to elucidating and subverting violent colonial transgressions. Both her academic work and social activism are fundamentally concerned with the outmoding and dismantling of colonial hierarchies, the rebalancing of unequal power relations between Indigenous peoples and White settlers, and the eventual forging of alternative modes of relation.