Hardback : $170.00
This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural self in black drama originates from the complex intersection of three discourses: Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and Post-Afrocentric. From
blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theatres and the scholarly debate on the (non)existence of African drama, Olaniyan cogently
maps the terrains of a cultural struggle and underscores a peculiar situation in which the inferiorization of black performance forms is most often a shorthand for subordinating black culture and corporeality. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory and cultural studies, and offering detailed readings of the above writers, Olaniyan shows how they occupy the interface between the Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space where black theatrical-cultural
difference could be envisioned as a site of multiple articulations: race, class, gender, genre, and language.
This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural self in black drama originates from the complex intersection of three discourses: Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and Post-Afrocentric. From
blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theatres and the scholarly debate on the (non)existence of African drama, Olaniyan cogently
maps the terrains of a cultural struggle and underscores a peculiar situation in which the inferiorization of black performance forms is most often a shorthand for subordinating black culture and corporeality. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory and cultural studies, and offering detailed readings of the above writers, Olaniyan shows how they occupy the interface between the Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space where black theatrical-cultural
difference could be envisioned as a site of multiple articulations: race, class, gender, genre, and language.
"An excellent job and...[a] must for students of African
Literature."--V.Y. Mudimbe, Duke University.
"[This book] is destined to elevate comparative research on African
Diaspora drama out of the sub-basement of scholarship. Olaniyan
literally performs this transformation by his choice of authors,
carefull attention to texts, and criticism informed broadly by a
rich dialogue among contemporary cultural and literary
theorists.... The argument is presented forcfully, at times
eloquently, with a turn of phrase likely to be quoted in the future
by other
scholars."--Ve Ve Clark, University of California, Berkeley.
"A long overdue and very successful comparaitve approach to several
of the most important contemporary Black playwrights. Scars of
Conquest/Masks of Resistance offers a fascinating, ambitious, and
challenging reading of modern pan-African drama as a specific
conceptual formation and cultural practice. Drawing on a variety of
contemporary critical languages, but equally conversant in the
contestatory idioms of Negritude writers, Fanon, and their
inheritors, Olaniyan illuminates not only the convergence of
competing discourses and historical pressures that helped shape a
distinctive pan-African theater, but forces reconsideration of the
drama's "ambiguous"
stagings of anticolonial and "post-Afrocentric" aspirations.
Olaniyan's attention to subtle inflections of language and genre
produce stimulating and persuasive readings of individual plays,
and form the core of his vision of Black drama as an endless
"reinvention" of postcolonial identities."--Kimberly W. Benston,
Haverford College.
"The publication of this book marks the emergence of a major new
intellect in the field of post-colonial studies."--Abiola Irele,
The Ohio State University, and Editor, Research in African
Literatures.
"An excellent job and...[a] must for students of African
Literature."--V.Y. Mudimbe, Duke University.
"[This book] is destined to elevate comparative research on African
Diaspora drama out of the sub-basement of scholarship. Olaniyan
literally performs this transformation by his choice of authors,
carefull attention to texts, and criticism informed broadly by a
rich dialogue among contemporary cultural and literary
theorists.... The argument is presented forcfully, at times
eloquently, with a turn of phrase likely to be quoted in the future
by other
scholars."--Ve Ve Clark, University of California, Berkeley.
"A long overdue and very successful comparaitve approach to several
of the most important contemporary Black playwrights. Scars of
Conquest/Masks of Resistance offers a fascinating, ambitious, and
challenging reading of modern pan-African drama as a specific
conceptual formation and cultural practice. Drawing on a variety of
contemporary critical languages, but equally conversant in the
contestatory idioms of Negritude writers, Fanon, and their
inheritors, Olaniyan illuminates not only the convergence of
competing discourses and historical pressures that helped shape a
distinctive pan-African theater, but forces reconsideration of the
drama's "ambiguous"
stagings of anticolonial and "post-Afrocentric" aspirations.
Olaniyan's attention to subtle inflections of language and genre
produce stimulating and persuasive readings of individual plays,
and form the core of his vision of Black drama as an endless
"reinvention" of postcolonial identities."--Kimberly W. Benston,
Haverford College.
"The publication of this book marks the emergence of a major new
intellect in the field of post-colonial studies."--Abiola Irele,
The Ohio State University, and Editor, Research in African
Literatures.
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