Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama

by Tejumola Olaniyan

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195357509
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/22/1995
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	1530L (what's this?)
File size:	414 KB

About the Author

University of Virginia

Table of Contents

	Introduction	3
I	Contingent "Origins"
1.	Agones: The Constitution of a Practice	11
	A Colonialist Discourse	12
	A Counterhegemonic Discourse	18
	A Post-Afrocentric Discourse	26
2.	Difference, Differently	29
	The Expressive and the Performative	30
	Cultural Identity as Articulation	35
	Genre	37
	Language	38
II	Inventing Cultural Identities
3.	Wole Soyinka: "Race Retrieval" and Cultural Self-Apprehension	43
	Assimilative Wisdom and Period Dialectics	45
	History as Mythopoeic Resource	49
	The Cultural, the Political	58
4.	LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: The Motion of History	67
	The Violence of Naming	67
	The Protean Essence	69
5.	Derek Walcott: Islands of History at a Rendezvous with a Muse	93
	History as Culture: The Romance of Adam	97
	Toward Inflammatory Dreams (for the New World Black)	104
	Author as Text and Character	109
	Coherent Deformation and Its Context	111
6.	Ntozake Shange: The Vengeance of Difference, or The Gender of Black Cultural Identity	116
	Combat Breathing	120
	"A Layin on of Hands"	128
7.	Subjectivities and Institutions	139
	Notes	143
	Bibliography	171
	Index	191

Editorial Reviews

"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.

From the Publisher