FREN 5170: Francophone African Theater and Performance (Valente Quinn)

John Conteh-Morgan explores the multiple ways in which African and Caribbean theatres have combined aesthetic, ceremonial, experimental, and avant-garde practices in order to achieve sharp critiques of the nationalist and postnationalist state and to elucidate the concerns of the francophone world. More recent changes have introduced a transnational dimension, replacing concerns with national and ethnic solidarity in favor of irony and self-reflexivity. New Francophone African and Caribbean Theatres places these theatres at the heart of contemporary debates on global cultural and political practices and offers a more finely tuned understanding of performance in diverse diasporic networks.

This book aims to offer a broad history of theatre in Africa. The roots of African theatre are ancient and complex and lie in areas of community festival, seasonal rhythm and religious ritual, as well as in the work of popular entertainers and storytellers. Since the 1950s, in a movement that has paralleled the political emancipation of so much of the continent, there has also grown a theatre that comments back from the colonized world to the world of the colonists and explores its own cultural, political and linguistic identity. A History of Theatre in Africa offers a comprehensive, yet accessible, account of this long and varied chronicle, written by a team of scholars in the field. Chapters include an examination of the concepts of 'history' and 'theatre'; North Africa; Francophone theatre; Anglophone West Africa; East Africa; Southern Africa; Lusophone African theatre; Mauritius and Reunion; and the African diaspora.

Adewale Maja-Pearce analyzes contemporary African politics and society with absolute candor in these essays. Drawing on first-hand observations, and on conversations with journalists, intellectuals, students, artists, taxi drivers, and businessmen, he exposes the abuse of human rights by African governments, and celebrates the courage of those individuals who stand up to tyranny.

"Backgrounds and Criticism" presents documents on modern African drama generally and on the assembled texts and authors specifically, including little-known materials.? Featured are essays on Tawfik al-Hakim, Kateb Yacine, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and Femi Osofisan. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.

Biodun Jeyifo examines the connections between the innovative and influential writings of Wole Soyinka and his radical political activism. Jeyifo carries out detailed analyses of Soyinka's most ambitious works, relating them to the controversies generated by Soyinka's use of literature and theatre for radical political purposes. He gives a fascinating account of the profound but paradoxical affinities and misgivings Soyinka has felt about the significance of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Jeyifo also explores Soyinka's works with regard to the impact on his artistic sensibilities of the pervasiveness of representational ambiguity and linguistic exuberance in Yoruba culture. The analyses and evaluations of this study are presented in the context of Soyinka's sustained engagement with the violence of collective experience in post-independence, postcolonial Africa and the developing world. No existing study of Soyinka's works and career has attempted such a systematic investigation of their complex relationship to politics.

Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In Signs of Dissent, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Condé's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Condé enacts a strategy of "critical incorporations" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits. By rejecting the facile classification of her work as "Caribbean," "African," or "feminist," Condé has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Condé's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. Signs of Dissent offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization--the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women's plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.

Africa, West -- Social conditions -- Drama., Subject: Drama., Industrialists -- Africa, West -- Drama., Industrialists., Railroads -- Africa, West -- Drama., Railroads., Social conditions., West Africa.

The work of renowned Ivoirian playwright Koffi Kwahulé has been translated into some 15 languages and is performed regularly throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. For the first time, Seven Plays of Koffi Kwahulé: In and Out of Africa makes available to an Anglophone audience some of the best and most representative plays by one of Francophone Africa's most accomplished living playwrights. Kwahulé's theater delves into both the horror of civil war in Africa and the diasporic experience of peoples of African origin living in Europe and the "New World." From the split consciousness of the protagonist and rape victim in Jaz to the careless buffoonery of mercenaries in Brewery, Kwahulé's characters speak in riffs and refrains that resonate with the improvisational pulse of jazz music. He confronts us with a violent world that represents the damage done to Africa and asks us, through exaggeration and surreal touches, to examine the reality of an ever-expanding network of global migrants. His plays speak to the contemporary state of humanity, suffering from exile, poverty, capitalist greed, collusion, and fear of "the other"--however that "other" gets defined. Judith G. Miller's introductory essay situates Kwahulé among his postcolonial contemporaries. Short introductory essays to each play, accompanied by production photos, contextualize possible approaches to Kwahulé's often enigmatic work. Anglophone theater scholars and theater professionals eager to engage with contemporary theater beyond their borders, particularly in terms of what so-called minority theater artists from other countries are creating, will welcome this indispensable collection. Students and scholars of African studies and of global French studies will also find this work intriguing and challenging.  

Subjects:
Africa -- Emigration and immigration -- Drama., Africa., Africans -- Europe -- Drama., Africans., Cameroonian drama (French), Drama., Emigration and immigration., Europe., Illegal aliens -- Europe -- Drama., Illegal aliens., Refugees -- Drama., Refugees., Undocumented immigrants.

Homme de th tre, romancier et nouvelliste, Koffi Kwahul (C te d'Ivoire, 1956) appartient la g n ration des auteurs de la postind pendance. Revendiquant son appartenance la diaspora noire, ses pi ces r dig es entre 1991 et 2005 constituent la p riode jazz de son th tre au cours de laquelle son criture s'inspire de l' coute obsessionnelle de Coltrane, Monk ou encore Coleman. L'utopie po tique de l'auteur afro-europ en - effacer la s paration entre le drame et la musique - remet en question la notion m me de drame et fait dialoguer le th tre avec d'autres esth tiques contemporaines. Mais cette criture-jazz, dont la radicalit trouve sa source dans la m moire de l'histoire des Noirs en Europe et en Am rique, soul ve galement des questions politiques: celles de l'identit et des conditions de possibilit d'un avenir en fusion.

The Aesthetic and Moral Art of Wole Soyinka, a scholarly monograph, is a compendium of the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka's creative works. Book One shows the dramatic, intellectual, fundamental, aesthetic and moral art. Book Two dwells upon literature, value, art, morality, aesthetics and other human interests. Book Three speaks to the mythology, history, and culture of the Yoruba people. The research lets one know that literature is an integral part of mythology, from which Soyinka has derived his inspiration.