Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics: Staging Resistance

ISBN-13: 9781137492784 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 162 str.

Glenn Odom

Opis

Nigerian politicians speak about national identity, the past and future of the nation, the value of strong authority, and the need for a firm moral standard. These same categories of identity, time, authority, and morality emerge in the construction of Nigerian theatre and Nigerian performance. Masked dances like the Gelede rituals, the prophetic performances of Ifa divination, the recitation of praise poetry and other performances that have been part of Yoruba society for generations shed light on how these categories have traditionally been used. When politicians manipulate these categories, theatre can act as resistance to this manipulation by using identity, time, morality, and authority in different ways. This book looks at five performance traditions, five playwrights, and five different moments in the political history of Nigeria to explore the resistant potential of the basic structures of Nigerian theatre and performance.

Recenzje

"Glenn Odom's Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics creatively links the politics of ritual and theatrical performances to the rhetoric and policies of some of Nigeria's leading nationalist politicians and civilian and military leaders from the 1950s to the early 1990s. ... A major strength of Odom's work is the rich array of ethnographic and oral sources that he uses to illuminate a Yoruba vocabulary in particular." (John Thabiti Willis, TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 63 (1), 2019)

Spis treści

1. Performance and Ìfægbôntáayé«e: Genre, Knowledge, and Politics
2. A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Individual Authority, Community Creation, and the Embodiment of À«÷
3. What Matter Who Dances: Self-fashioning, (non)Subjects, and the Nation
4. No Victor, no Vanquished, no Past: Ola Rotimi, Yakubu Gowon, Sani Abacha, and ' 'The End of Nigerian History ' '
5. Values beyond Ethics: From Stella Dia Oyedepo to Tess Onwueme
6. Conclusions: Civil Governance and the Politics of Yorùbá Theatre
Bibliography
Index

O autorze

Glenn Odom is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, UK. His previous publications include articles in journals such as Comparative Drama, Comparative Literature, TDR (The Drama Review) and Studies in English Literature.