I ask these questions because many other scholars have
interrogated the validity of the concept or designation of
postcolonial theory in the age of globalization and Diaspora
studies. They argue that postcolonial theory is too
amorphous, too faceless, too derivative of a Eurocentric
notion of theory that it obscures the cultural and national
specificities that shape theory itself or distinguish
African theories from Asian, Australian, Canadian, Caribbean
or Native American theories. As practiced presently,
Post-colonial theory has become a blanket term for covering
everything the Western world finds threatening to its own
definition of theory. A vessel of containment. Leela Ghandi,
who is Asian , frames this patronizing agenda beautifully
when she argues that: In its current mood postcolonial theory principally
addresses the needs of the Western academy . It attempts to
reform the intellectual and epistemological exclusions of
this academy, and enables non-Western critics located in the
West to present their cultural inheritance as knowledge.
This is, of course, a worthwhile project, and to an extent,
its efforts have been rewarded. The Anglo American
humanities academy has gradually stretched its disciplinary
boundaries to include hitherto submerged and occluded voices
from the non-Western world, But, of course, what
post-colonialism fails to recognize is that what counts as
`marginal’ in relation to the West has often been central
and foundational in the non-West. Thus, while it may be
revolutionary to teach Gandhi as political theory in the
Anglo-American academy , he is , and has always been,
canonical in India. Despite its good intentions, then,
post-colonialism continues to render non-Western knowledge
and culture as ‘other’ in relation to the normative ‘self’
of Western epistemology and rationality. Rarely does it
[i.e. postcolonial discourse] engage with the theoretical
self-sufficiency of African, Indian, Korean, Chinese
knowledge systems or foreground those cultural and
historical conversations which circumvent the Western world.4 Leela Gandhi’s expression “self-sufficiency” interests me a
lot. Its implication for `postcolonial’ theatre scholars,
researchers and practitioners is that we need to abandon
the `post colonial’ terminology altogether, alongside the
term ‘precolonial’ and begin to discuss African
performative experience and the history of its theorization
in a new, and subversive, light, namely, as a historical
continuum that straddles African history and its Diaspora in
its own right by deploying theoretical constructs couched in
our own indigenous languages. We need to rethink African
theatrical and dramatic history as valid in its own right,
with a troubled diachronic existence, yes, with complex
diasporic implications, yes, but we definitely cannot go on
forever overemphasizing the colonial moment as the starting
point or arbiter of our intellectual and performative
history. We need to recontextualize historical happenstances
such as slavery, colonialism, hybridity, syncreticism,
interculturality, and the current `brain drain’ of African
intellectuals to the West as serious and important
interventions in our continent’s history of itself and its
performative intelligence at home and in the Diaspora. These
culturally disruptive and metamorphic processes need not be
at the centre of our discourse about ourselves and our
artforms but relevant asides and epistemological parentheses
inevitable in this discourse about ourselves to avoid the
Western accusation of “essentialism”. But, whether we are
African scholars living on the continent or economic exiles
in the West, it is our ultimate responsibility to
introduce to the West new, and, in fact, more exciting
approaches to the discourse and practice of theory in the
twenty first century. Whether you are a Ph.D. student in
Britain or a tenured African scholar in a North American
university, your work lives or dies on the basis of how well
it is theorized. So there is no hiding place since what ever
is not theorized does not exist. This includes racism. So
how do we start to engage with theory and begin the journey
of defining our own theoretical framework for the study,
analysis, research and fieldwork of our performances. We
need to ask ourselves: What exactly is theory? Do Africans have theories of their
own performances? If they do, in what languages do these
theories exist? If Africans do not have theories of their
performances, who has made this judgment and for what
purpose? And in what language and with what license has
this judgment been made? Even more provocatively, we need to
ask the crucial question: at what point does a theory
become a theory? Is it when it is being thought out in the
brain, a child of the mind? Or is when it is being performed
as the semiological refraction of an aesthetic notion,
cultural idea or ontological concept that informs the way
i.e. the form in which a people perform themselves, who they
are , their history, and worldview. Or does theory only
exist when it is written down, the residue of a specifically
typographical mode of discourse. What I mean here is this.
Does theory exist outside the scholarly academy? Can it be
expressed in forms other than writing? Can theory only be
expressed in English and French and German and Portuguese
(that is, can it be essentialized into a European
discourse) or can Yoruba, Igbo, Ashanti, Zulu, Ewe languages
etc etc also be viable media for the dissemination of this
extraordinary thing called theory? If Africans and other
non-western peoples do not have theories of their
performance in their own languages, how then do they create
their theatrical performances and critique them, year after
year? What critical construct helps them to improve the
aesthetic configurations, functionality, and efficacies of
these performances if they have no theories? How can they
make sense of what they are doing, as a community, if there
is no theoretical construct undergirding the creation of
their performances? In other words, how can a Kalabari,
Ashanti, Zulu, Mossi, Ewe or an Igbo community like the
Afikpo create the Okumkpa theatre tradition if there is no
guiding theory of what they want to create? So, to return to our thesis, if the tendency in the West is
to theorize a performance after it has been created – this
is usually done by some exceptionally brilliant scholar
steeped in the writings and typographical methodologies of
his predecessors and such a scholar can actually theorize
dance even if he or she has two left legs. – must this
chiropractic paradigm, which emanates from the West’s own
history, be replicated the world over? Can theory , as in
the Igbo tradition and other African traditions that I know,
be a forerunner to creativity. Can it even be the impetus
to writing. Can theory be the map or compass to the purpose
and process of the conceptualization, execution and
expression of a typical African theatrical performance
especially if the performance is created as result of
communal consensus instead the genius of one individual? Is
the African methodology of theatrical criticism a kind of
metacriticism, one which operates from within the
theoretical infrastructure of a community as encoded in its
own languages and metalanguages. When the Akusa drum
disqualifies an Alagba masquerade performer among the Kalabari of Nigeria
because he has failed to point out the correct ancestral or
historical house/oru, is there a critical theory involved in
that aesthetic/performative judgment? When the
narrator/cantor/communal poet refers to the Ijele of
the Igbos as “the universe in motion” is there a conceptual
theory at work? When a Babalawo begins to listen to his
acolyte in training reciting the verses of divination, is
there a theory of orature at work? When the Efik captives
from Calabar replicated Ekpe as Abakua in
Cuba, was there a theory of performance that undergirded
that translocation or syncretization or creolization of an
indigenous African masquerade performance tradition? If
there is no theory involved, how come that the aesthetic
principles and philosophies of art as well semiotic elements
replicated in the performance in the African Diaspora embody
the same stylistic, choreographic, spiritual and
participatory efficacies that existed and still exist on
the continent? Let me flesh this out by providing a
historical archeology of this call to arms, this charge to
create and recognize our own theories, this challenge to not
just redefine western theory but to prove that we indeed
have our own theories of performance some of which are older
than the Greeks. As Wole Soyinka once put it wittily: “Ogun
and Dionysus are brothers. But Ogun is Dionysus’ elder
brother!” The Quest for an African Diasporic Theory: A Historical
Archeology In 1976, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate and
playwright, was invited, after winning the John Whiting
Award for playwriting, to Cambridge University as a fellow.
In the course of his stay, he discovered that his lectures
had been consigned, not to the Department of English, but to
the Dept of Social Anthropology because some dim but
distinguished English egghead at Cambridge did not believe
in any such mythical beast called African Literature or
African Drama. In the introduction to his book, Myth, Literature
and the African World, which came in the aftermath of
his Cambridge experience, Soyinka wrote: We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit
ourselves to a second epoch of colonization – this time by a
universal – humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by
individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived
from their history, their
social neuroses and their value
systems. 5 While at Cambridge, Soyinka met a young African-American
doctoral candidate who was trying to find an alternative,
post-structuralist, albeit vernacular theory for the
analysis and appreciation of African-American Literature.
This young man’s name was Henry Louis Gates. Several years
later, Gates, out of frustration, would write in his
ground–breaking essay, “Canon-formation and the
Afro-American Tradition,” an essay I sometimes like to
describe as “a public split in the trousers of the great”,
that we must not succumb to the tragic lure of white power,
the mistake of accepting the empowering language of white
critical theory as ‘universal’ or as our own language, the
mistake of confusing the enabling masks of theory with our
own black faces…Now, we must , at last, don the empowering
mask of blackness and talk that talk,
the language of black difference. 6 Top | Previous | 1 2 3 4 | Next |
Esiaba
Irobi – a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in
the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in
exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where
he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the
Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a
B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A.
Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play,
Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award.
His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold,
Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don’t Like Philip
Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and
a son, Nnamdi.