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African Drama and Performance. Edited by John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. 274. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.
African Drama and Performance is a comprehensive study of drama and performance in Africa from traditional to contemporary times and encompasses the oral and the written, rural and urban performance, and popular culture and the elite avant-garde. Based on thematic affinities, the book is divided into five parts: general context, intercultural negotiations, radical politics and aesthetics, popular expressive genres and the performance of culture, and the social as drama. In its eighteen chapters, contributors cover issues of theory and practice of drama and performance as well as discussion of specific dramatic and performance modes and works.
The background materials of drama and performance derive from cultural, social, political, and historical happenings in people's lives. In the opening chapter, Wole Soyinka's address to the African Union underscores the political underpinnings of modern African theatre, especially in the dictatorship syndrome that his play King Baabu satirizes. Joachim Fiebach addresses "symbolic actions" in traditional Africa and the acting-out of power structures that are also manifest in class and gender conflicts. While Johannes Fabian finds theatricality reflecting the culture, Ato Quayson sees theatre as "a minimal paraphrase...