Gates goes on to give us a provocative definition of
‘theory’. Tracing the word to its Greek original ‘theoria’
he defines theory as “a public, institutional act of
certification which assumes the authority to ‘effect the
passage from the seen to the told’: and provides the basis
for public discourse. Theory, then, is – like rhetoric – a
form of cognition modeled upon public utterance rather than
upon private perception.”7 Gates
argues that if we must form black canons, we must be ready
and willing to produce black text-specific theory. He goes
on to caution that, “when we mindlessly borrow another
tradition’s theory, we undermine this passage from the seen
to the told – from what we see to how we tell it – this
basis for our own black public discourse, this recognition
between cognition and utterance.”8 He
argues that in theorizing our cultural experiences and
artforms, we must search for intellectual paradigms that are
indigenous to our cultures and states, significantly, that
“the future of theory in the remainder of this century “is
black,”9 in
deed. Gates theoretical hypothesis which he illustrates with
mesmerizing brilliance in The
Signifying Monkey, is a critical paradigm which has been
adopted by numerous scholars in the fields of Art History,
Literature, Music, Film, Cinema, and Cultural Studies. Its
uniqueness as a postmodern, metacritical, discourse stems
from the fact that it deploys a vernacular albeit African
mythopoeic framework for the author’s exegesis and
engagement with African-American literary texts. The basis
for Gates theoretical coup d’état , indigenous African
mythic and epistemic knowledge speaking truth to modern and
post-modern power, loose canons hitting and deconstructing
sacrosanct white and Western targets, a public split in the
trousers of the great, is a need and critical facility
that all cultures have: an unquenchable desire to
explicate, interpret, communicate, mythify, sanctify and
signify on and about their lives and its performativities
from the perspective of their own chosen ontology,
mythology, semiology, teleology and epistemology in a bid
to create new narratologies of their historical experiences
no matter how hybridized, colonized, globalized,
problematized, hegemonized, complex or conflicted their
identities and histories have become in the wake of
modernity and postmodernity. This necessity is not only
human but inevitable. What Gates means by the phrase “the future of theory – in
the twenty-first century – is black” is that there are
aspects of black experience, modes and codes of cultural
expression, ontological, epistemological and semiological
constructs of Africa and the African Diaspora that lie
outside and beyond the provenance of western theory since
theory is by its very nature, a cultural product. This makes
the whole idea of postcolonial theory even more problematic. As a response to the provocations in this theoretically
counterhegemonic paper, I am excited to say that I am
working on a book titled Before
They Danced in Chains: Performance Theories of Africa and
the African Diaspora which attempts to
reevaluate and expand the discourse of Performance Theory
as it is understood and practiced in the West and the rest
of the world today. My intention, is first and foremost
to contextualize performance and the creation and migration
of performance theory within a framework of globalization
which stretches to the earliest movement of human beings
from the Rift Valley to the rest of the globe. This
teleology subverts the "pre-colonial”, “colonial” and
“postcolonial” paradigm favoured by the West. I argue that
there is a theoretical continuum of African ways of knowing
and doing and performance that stretches from Africa’s first
experience/contacts with Moorish, Arabic, Mediterranean and
Indian globalizations from 600 AD to the present. This
natural migration of theories of performance alongside the
movement of people via emigration, exile and travel has
continued well into 21st century.
The sexy variation of globalization we are now faced with is
not any different from the former ones. Its only uniqueness
is that it comes on the heels of slavery, colonialism,
neocolonialism whose impetus is propelled by a mercantile
European and North American capitalistic imperative and
greed. The book therefore makes migration, not
colonialism, central to our understanding of how African
theories of performance have traveled and remerged in the
Africa Diaspora. The book also reinscribes African
concepts, notions, philosophies and theories of performance
into contemporary scholarship through “African” languages
as the constitutive infrastructure of our contemporary
scholarship. For example, the book asks: What is the
“Gelede” Theory of the Yorubas, “Sankofa” Theory of the Akan,
“Ijele” Theory of the Igbos, “Alagba” Theory of the Kalabari,
“Kete” Theory of the Ashanti, “Sangoma” Theory of the Zulus.
“Kora” theory of the Bambara. “Ituika” Theory of the
Kikuyus. To understand these theories, we need to learn the
languages they stem from and stop making judgements of
entire cultures and histories without knowing or
understanding their languages. Languages express the ideas
of the persons who speak them and are the keys to those
dimensions of their being and perception of the world that
are inexpressible in any other languages. (Languages are
our first and foremost covenant with God. They are the
primary markers of our identities. God hears prayers in all
languages. The easiest way to derail and confuse a people
is to ask them to theorize themselves in another person’s
language. Just as the easiest way to derogate their
intelligence is to ask them to articulate who they are
through somebody else’s theories couched in that person’s
languages. The Japanese do not do this! The Chinese do not!
The Koreans! The Indians! The Aboriginal Australians! Only
Africans. And people of African descent in the African
Diaspora! So, why us ? Why us? Why always us! By domesticating theory from an African linguistic
perspective we will be able to force Western/white/Africanist
scholars to study one or two of African languages in order
to understand the complex artistic ideas and philosophies
that undergird the performances, oratures, and literatures
of African cultures even if some of the literatures are
extrapolated in English language. African literature, for
example, is the only literature in the world that anybody
can teach without knowing how to speak a single African
language. You cannot do this in Spanish or French or Russian
or Swedish or Portuguese Literature. By theorizing or at
least encoding our core theories of orature and performance
and literary expression in African languages, we will
therefore addle the scholars of the Western academy , an
institution of Western hegemony we have all come to inherit,
into the awareness that all cultures of the world have
theories of their own performances in their own languages.
We will all then come to the intellectual epiphany that,
historically, these theories predate Western theories of
performance and would have been equal currencies for
scholarly discourse had it not been for the predatory and
hegemonic influences of slavery, colonization, capitalism,
typographic literacy, and globalization which led to the
subordination and subjugation and even the extermination of
whole peoples, languages, cultures and indigenous/vernacular
theories. In other words, the Native Americans, Mexicans,
Africans, South Americans, Caribbeans, Aboriginal
Australians would have been able to express themselves and
articulate their theories of performance today on equal
terms with the West had it not been for the fangs of history
and the errors of the rendering of other people’s cultural
intelligence by the West. This effort, for me, becomes all the more important in the
wake of globalization, when the dynamics of cultural
survival as refracted through performance should stem from
one’s indigenous aesthetic traditions as a marker of
identity in a progressively fragmenting, disneyfying and
globalizing world. In essence , what I am summarizing here,
is that “aesthetic” is political and a consciousness of
one’s indigenous “aesthetic” as well as theoretical
traditions, if intelligently deployed in performance,
painting, dance, playwriting, acting, redefines the meaning
and significance as well as formalistic properties of any
work of artistic expression despite the syncretic or
hybridizing or creolizing or intercultural tendency of the
present. What I mean here is that what will make my play different
from a Chinese or Japanese play written by somebody living
in New York is my deployment of Igbo aesthetic elements and
performance theories in my work. And to be able to do this I
need to do the necessary research into what existed in Igbo
culture before the intrusion of Europeans into the African
universe . Hybridity as it is now discussed seems to be
happy and exciting affair. Few artists and scholars are
ready to engage with the fact that hybridity is indeed a
very violent process. Our present attitude to hybridity,
under postcolonial theory, is to adore the mixed-race
child as beautiful. What we do not want to do is to confront
the history and anguish of the relationship that produced
the baby. A little understanding of where the parents come
from will help us better understand what the child is made
up of or will become in the fullness of time. We must go
back to sage philosophy , to the excavation of the theories
of our performances and oratures that have shaped and
powered the great breakthroughs in form and structure and
dynamics of art, painting, literature as exemplified by the
works of Picasso, Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo, Ben Okri, Dennis
Scott, Alvin Ailey, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Urban
Bush Women, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and a myriad others. The
knowledge/theory is there, waiting only to be excavated and
properly documented and deployed in all aspects of our
creativity including our theatrical acting styles and
“subaltern” discourses on performance theory, orature and
literature. Jonathan Culler puts the impetus of my argument
about theory this way: Foucault claims to analyse a particular historical moment,
so the question that arises is whether his large
generalizations hold for other times and places. Raising
follow-up questions like these is, in turn, our way of
stepping into theory and practicing it.9 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.