by Esiaba Irobi

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, from The Empire Strikes Back through Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason to Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia is a reaction to Western imperialist history and intellectual ideology. It is a spirited engagement with the structures of thinking and actions that facilitate the continued subordination, marginalization and exploitation of the intellectual resources and cultural reserves of the previously colonized peoples of the Western and non-Western worlds. It is also a subtle examination of the many and often conflicting strands that make up the postcolonial situation and identity. It seeks to dismantle the epistemologies of intellectual hegemony cultivated by the West via its academies as well as confront the ex-colonized with the options available for their critical redemption via alternative modes of discourse which may be different and antithetical in structure and content from those traditions of discourse fashioned by the West. In temperament, post-colonial theory differs from postmodern theory primarily in the sense that it often combines individual emotional commitment and outrage with a defiant optimism which is much more strident and activist than an acquiescent postmodernism.¹ We see this intensity in the scholarly work of Wole Soyinka, Biodun Jeyifo, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Rustom Barucha, Augusto Boal, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Henry Louis Gates, Coco Fusco, Guillerma Gomez-Pena, among many others.

However, post-colonial theory’s major linguistic currency is English language followed by French and other European languages. Its teleology , by this I mean how it conceptualizes time and history, mirrors and sometimes interrogates European and European diasporic notions of time and history. Its epistemological impetus i.e. how it defines knowledge, culture, artistic productivity, theatre, performance, also imitates or, contradictorily, questions what the West has already foregrounded. In other words, the agenda for post-colonial theory and the possible space for manouvre by any postcolonial scholar is over-determined or, to use a fairer word, circumscribed by a Western ontology and a response to this ontology. Why is this so? Abiola Irele explains:

The Western academy remains the unique source of validation for the African scholar…. Our credentials depend in the first place on the initial foundation of our prior training, which is based upon materials that are exclusively Western… Nobody expects an American (or European scholar) to know anything about Africa…except perhaps as specialist knowledge. But an African scholar with only elementary grounding and familiarity with the Western content of his discipline has little hope of advancing in his profession. This observation holds true even in Africa today.²

Abiola Irele goes on to emphasize how the situation described above leads to a seemingly `inauthentic’ or `illegitimate’ academic discourse about African cultural/intellectual productivity for both African scholars on the continent and those who are economic exiles in the West: The language and concepts that we use are foreign, so that we start with a marked disadvantage in our apprenticeship within the profession. And because this language, this body of concepts, has not been generated within our environment, we have no choice but to produce what is ultimately a derived discourse.³

What Abiola Irele’s statement implies is that even when you are writing about your own theories of performance as an African scholar, it is the Western academy that evaluates and validates the usefulness, efficiency and accuracy of your theories using its own Western parameters, languages, methodologies and critical yardsticks all of which are culturally situated and determined. We then come to realize, as African scholars, that theory and its practice, as disciplines of scholarship, do not exist in a vacuum neither are they innocent or neutral or blindly global or universal. They are products of specific cultures and histories and sensibilities and so even our attempts to redefine these concepts in order to articulate the uniqueness of our own cultural experience carry the burden and stigma of a derivative historical imperative. This is a disturbing predicament or dilemma for a people who have so much to give the world in the field of performance studies both from the continent and the Diaspora. Can we really express our indigenous cultural intelligence and theories of performance through the latticework of somebody else’s thought-policing academy, ontology, and framework of intellectual and critical ideologies.

When we talk ecstatically about the achievements of postcolonial theory are we acquiescing to a notion that African theories of performance exist only because there was colonialism? Are we participating in an unscholarly conspiracy that African theories of performance can only be expressed in European languages? Are we suggesting that the West has given us the speech and linguistic infrastructure to theorize our performances. Are we saying that we do not have these analytical tools in our indigenous languages and never had them until the Europeans arrived in the 15thcentury. Are we agreeing with a European scholar I met at a conference in the US who told me quite assertively , his nose in the air, his head poised like a dumb man’s penis, that theory is Greek. In other words, that only Aristotle had a brain or a head for the critical analysis of performances written and unwritten, literary and oral. Are we suggesting that African communities whose theatrical creations equal the Greeks in their mythopoeic complexity and polysemic sophistication are incapable of theorizing their own performances? Is this what we are saying? That theory exists only in the academy and can only be done by Western trained scholars like ourselves? That there are no intellectuals in our villages and homelands. Only in the metropolis. Finally, when we adopt a postcolonial teleology of our theory and intellectual history, are we, then, accepting the notion that African history can only be divided into pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial epochs. Are we saying that had Africa not been colonized, there would be no theory or capacity for theory in the minds and cultural life of Africans?

I believe that the answers to these questions are obvious. And since they are, do we not need to ask ourselves the question: Are there other teleologies of theory that can circumvent the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial paradigms? Suppose we return to a remapping of Africa through performances and cultural practices which can help us rediscover the “premodern” African nations which existed before the “made-in-Europe” nations after the Berlin conference in 1885. Suppose we decide to include the theoretical concepts of these pre-modern nations, as expressed in their indigenous languages, in our scholarly essays - even if the extrapolations are done in English language – what will happen? What is wrong with articulating and canonizing a Gelede theory of African and African Diasporic Feminist performance, an Ijele theory, Ketetheory, Alagba theory, Oriki theory, Sangoma theory, Ituika theory based respectively on the performance traditions, theories and languages of such pre-modern African nations such as the Ashanti, Igbo , Yoruba , Gikuyu, Zulu, Ewe, Akan, etc Will anybody whip us publicly with grains of salt on our naked buttocks or strangle us if we attempt to include these new critical and interpretative concepts into the contemporary currency of what exists now as theory? What will happen if we throw overboard the notion of postcolonial theory and think of African and African–derived performance theory in a diasporic trajectory instead of the post-colonial episteme? By this I mean that there is ample evidence that a good number of African theories of performance migrated from the African continent to the brave new world, namely North and South America and the Caribbean before colonialism which started only in 1885. These theories did not get there as typographical literacy. They went there from 1441 to 1856 as kinaesthetic/phenomenological and iconographic literacies. They got there because the body is a site of discourse. And just as some cultures privilege the dissemination of information and knowledge through writing, oral cultures of the world privilege the encoding and decoding of precious information in the body and the expression of these knowledges through performance. That is why our people were able to survive spiritually and artistically in the new World. Another way of putting it is that the Africans who were translocated to the new world lost their names, their languages, their geographies and original communities but they still replicated syncretized versions of indigenous African performance forms such as Abakua, Candomble, Lucumi, Bembe and Carnival based on African theories of festivity and ritual performance. So, why can we not push forward a concept such as the Ijele theory which builds a bridge between an indigenous tradition of iconographic codification and celebration of beauty and community and history and festivity on the continent and their replication in Brazil, the Caribbean basin and Europe, via Carnival. Why do we have to keep citing Mikhail Bakhtin and the concept of the carnivalesque when the Ijele theory is there waiting to be used , waiting to be deployed as a more original interpretative framework of this African Diasporic performance tradition? If we do not do this now, who will do it for us?