Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance

Tejumola Olaniyan. Scars of Conquest/ Masks of Resistance. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 196 pp. $42.00 cloth/$16.95 paper.

In this brilliant study, Professor Olaniyan surveys the origins and parameters of African-based theatre through a history that has evolved over 300 years in Africa, America, and the Caribbean. Through a system of discourse analysis, he establishes what he perceives to be the three postures: the "hegemonic, Colonialist Eurocentric, the counter-hegemonic, anticolonialist Afrocentric, and an emerging postAfrocentric." Further, he assumes that, underlying the three separate discourses, are "two conceptual paradigms of cultural identity and difference: the expressive, with its rigid claims and oftentimes unexamined ethnocentric biases; and the performative, a self-critical model that conceives identity as open, interculturally negotiable, and always in the making-a process." Olaniyan attributes to the four playwrights included in his study a disposition toward "performative identity," and what he intends "is nothing less than an account of the social foundations of an aesthetic form, of the invention of a culturally situated 'black' dramatic theory and practice."

In the first two chapters grouped under the heading "Contingent Origins," Olaniyan invokes early manifestations in the Western Hemisphere, such as the blackface minstrels in the U.S. as of the 1830s and camboulay of Trinidad (without mentioning bufo in Cuba, a related phenomenon), as evidence of African origins. He cites at some length Ruth Finnegan's supposedly canonical work that criticizes Africans for failing to develop a Eurocentric style of theatre. Her work, he points out, ironically coincides with the development of the Black Arts Movement...