Hello Friends!
In this episode, we continue our inquiry into how cross dressing shows up across the African continent with a focus on theatrical performances. There is definitely European/Western influence…just not in the way you might think. As Nigerian poet, playwright, actor and academic Esiaba Irobi puts it:
Whereas the Europeans constructed their putative images of Africans as inferior beings through radio, television, film, and print, for a predominantly literate sector, Africans deployed a more complex and mixed set of literacies. As well as conventional forms of literature, Africans used iconographic, kinaesthetic, proxemic, sonic, linguistic, tactile, calligraphic and sartorial literacies in their indigenous festivals and ritual theatres to resist, historicize, and domesticate colonial whiteness from the nineteenth century to the present day.
I also learned something new! What do you know about Ghanaian Concert Party Theatre?
Watch the full episode of the hilarious skit featured in the intro of this episode
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References
Piñón, Javier López. Come you Spirits, Unsex me Here: Contemporary Theatre and African Ceremonies as a Playground for Alternative Masculinities. 2021.
Cole, Catherine M. Ghana's concert party theatre. Indiana University Press, 2001.
Finnegan, Ruth. Oral literature in Africa. Open Book Publishers, 2012. p 490
Labouret, Henri, and Moussa Travélé. “Le Théâtre Mandingue (Soudan Français).” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 1, no. 1, 1928, pp. 73–97. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1155864. Accessed 21 July 2024.
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