Performing Africa

Author : Paulla A. Ebron
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400825210
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Africa written by Paulla A. Ebron and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The jali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the "Africa" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of "global culture"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.

Author : Thomas Riccio
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820488998
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Africa written by Thomas Riccio and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original Scholarly Monograph

Author : Catherine M. Cole
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253353904
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing South Africa's Truth Commission written by Catherine M. Cole and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa.

Author : Jill Flanders Crosby
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 1683403797
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance written by Jill Flanders Crosby and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using storytelling and performance to explore shared religious expression across continents Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the transatlantic slave trade. The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities: Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at each fieldsite, the authors not only identify shared attributes in religious expression across continents, but also reveal lasting emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with insights gained from sensorial experience. Including reflections on the making of an art installation based on this research project, the volume challenges readers to imagine the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists and artists with relevance to any discipline. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Author : Linda M. Heywood
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674237447
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Njinga of Angola written by Linda M. Heywood and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of history’s most multifaceted rulers but little known in the West, Queen Njinga rivaled Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great in political cunning and military prowess. Today, she is revered in Angola as a heroine and honored in folk religions. Her complex legacy forms a crucial part of the collective memory of the Afro-Atlantic world.

Author : Laura Edmondson
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253035503
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Trauma in Central Africa written by Laura Edmondson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An outstanding addition to the literature on theatre and performance in situations of conflict and post-conflict.” —New Theatre Quarterly What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.

Author : Frances Harding
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136416897
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Performance Arts in Africa written by Frances Harding and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Performance Arts in Africa is the first anthology of key writings on African performance from many parts of the continent. As well as play texts, off the cuff comedy routines and masquerades, this exciting collection encompasses community-based drama, tourist presentations, television soap operas, puppet theatre, dance, song, and ceremonial ritualised performances. Themes discussed are: * theory * performers and performing * voice, language and words * spectators, space and time. The book also includes an introduction which examines some of the crucial debates, past and present, surrounding African performance. The Performance Arts of Africa is an essential introduction for those new to the field and is an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with African performance.

Author : Jonathan Holt Shannon
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253017742
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing al-Andalus written by Jonathan Holt Shannon and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing al-Andalus explores three musical cultures that claim a connection to the music of medieval Iberia, the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, known for its complex mix of Arab, North African, Christian, and Jewish influences. Jonathan Holt Shannon shows that the idea of a shared Andalusian heritage animates performers and aficionados in modern-day Syria, Morocco, and Spain, but with varying and sometimes contradictory meanings in different social and political contexts. As he traces the movements of musicians, songs, histories, and memories circulating around the Mediterranean, he argues that attention to such flows offers new insights into the complexities of culture and the nuances of selfhood.

Author : Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Publisher : Hurst Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1787388859
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Against Decolonisation written by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

Author : Osita Okagbue
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134407866
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book African Theatres and Performances written by Osita Okagbue and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Theatres & Performances looks at four specific performance forms in Africa and uses this to question the tendency to employ western frames of reference to analyze and appreciate theatrical performance. The book examines: masquerade theatre in Eastern Nigeria the trance and possession ritual theatre of the Hausa of Northern Nigeria the musical and oral tradition of the Mandinka of Senegal comedy and satire of the Bamana in Mali. Osita Okagbue describes each performance in detail and discusses how each is made, who it is made by and for, and considers the relationship between maker and viewer and the social functions of performance and theatre in African societies. The discussions are based on first-hand observation and interviews with performers and spectators. African Theatres & Performances gives a fascinating account of these practices, carefully tracing the ways in which performances and theatres are unique and expressive of their cultural context.