SOURCE: Amoko, Apollo. “Casting Aside Colonial Occupation: Intersections of Race, Sex, and Gender in Cloud Nine and Cloud Nine Criticism.”¹ Modern Drama 42, no. 1 (spring 1999): 45–58.

In the following essay, Amoko argues that Churchill's Cloud Nine repeatedly equates gender and sexual oppression with racial and colonial oppression.

… colonialism has long served as a metaphor for a wide range of dominations, collapsing the specific hierarchies of time and place into a seamless whole. In this scenario, “to colonize” is an evocative and active verb accounting for a range of inequities and exclusions—that may have little to do with colonialism at all. As a morality tale of the present the metaphor of colonialism has enormous force but it can also eclipse how varied the subjects are created by different colonialisms.²

A certain personal ambivalence defines my response to Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill's drama in two acts featuring an audacious attempt to...