Malik Gaines
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479837038
- eISBN:
- 9781479822607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479837038.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Shortly after its independence from Britain, Ghana became a transnational center for emerging political projects of black liberation. Its president, Kwame Nkrumah, sought to integrate a Marxist ...
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Shortly after its independence from Britain, Ghana became a transnational center for emerging political projects of black liberation. Its president, Kwame Nkrumah, sought to integrate a Marxist ideology with local knowledge in the context of the new nation-state, and proposed cultural initiatives that would support this synthesis. The plays of Efua Sutherland, a leading member of Ghana’s independence-era cultural elite, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who has come to be seen as an important figure of African post-colonial writing, reveal the ambitions and the difficulties of African modernity. Both writers situate a colonial legacy against Ghanaian cultural life and a black transnational influence. While fulfilling a state mandate for original productions, their plays (in particular, Sutherland’s Edufa and Foriwa, and Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost) complicate the statist ideology with an emergent African feminism that disallows synthesis, and shows the critical power of difference.Less
Shortly after its independence from Britain, Ghana became a transnational center for emerging political projects of black liberation. Its president, Kwame Nkrumah, sought to integrate a Marxist ideology with local knowledge in the context of the new nation-state, and proposed cultural initiatives that would support this synthesis. The plays of Efua Sutherland, a leading member of Ghana’s independence-era cultural elite, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who has come to be seen as an important figure of African post-colonial writing, reveal the ambitions and the difficulties of African modernity. Both writers situate a colonial legacy against Ghanaian cultural life and a black transnational influence. While fulfilling a state mandate for original productions, their plays (in particular, Sutherland’s Edufa and Foriwa, and Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost) complicate the statist ideology with an emergent African feminism that disallows synthesis, and shows the critical power of difference.
Malik Gaines
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479837038
- eISBN:
- 9781479822607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479837038.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political ...
More
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.Less
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.
