Scars of conquest - masks of resistance : the invention of cultural identities in African, African-American and Caribbean drama

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. Contents......Page 12 Introduction......Page 16 I: Contingent "Origins"......Page 22 1. Agones: The Constitution of a Practice......Page 24 A Colonialist Discourse......Page 25 A Counterhegemonic Discourse......Page 31 A Post-Afrocentric Discourse......Page 39 2. Difference, Differently......Page 42 The Expressive and the Performative......Page 43 Cultural Identity as Articulation......Page 48 Genre......Page 50 Language......Page 51 II: Inventing Cultural Identities......Page 54 3. Wole Soyinka: "Race Retrieval" and Cultural Self-Apprehension......Page 56 Assimilative Wisdom and Period Dialectics......Page 58 History as Mythopoeic Resource......Page 62 The Cultural, the Political......Page 71 The Violence of Naming......Page 80 The Protean Essence......Page 82 5. Derek Walcott: Islands of History at a Rendezvous with a Muse......Page 106 History as Culture: The Romance of Adam......Page 110 Toward Inflammatory Dreams (for the New World Black)......Page 117 Author as Text and Character......Page 122 Coherent Deformation and Its Context......Page 124 6. Ntozake Shange: The Vengeance of Difference, or The Gender of Black Cultural Identity......Page 129 Combat Breathing......Page 133 "A Layin on of Hands"......Page 141 7. Subjectivities and Institutions......Page 152 Notes......Page 156 Bibliography......Page 184 A......Page 204 C......Page 205 H......Page 206 P......Page 207 T......Page 208 Z......Page 209 Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance transforms the way we understand the English-language drama of the African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, Tejumola Olaniyan shows how these writers negotiate between an Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space.From blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Arts Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theaters, Olaniyan cogently maps the terrains of a cultural struggle, and shows how dismissive attitudes towards Black performance forms often serve as shorthand for subordinating Black culture and corporeality. Olaniyan's analysis of Post-Afrocentric discourse will interest scholars and student in a number of disciplines: African and African American culture, theater and culture, and postcolonial studies. Examining in detail the dramas of Baraka, Soyinka, Walcott and Shange, this study describes how these black writers are preoccupied with the invention of a postimperial cultural identity. It charts the foundations of an important aesthetic form, the drama of the African diaspora. Tejumola Olaniyan. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.