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THE PROBLEM WITH POST-COLONIAL THEORY:
Re-Theorizing African Performance, Orature and Literature
in the Age of Globalization and Diaspora Studies
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 15th
century. 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, Kete theory, 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?
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,
postcolonialism 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 concensus 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
judgement? 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 athroy 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
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
The essential problem with postcolonial theory, as it is
practiced today, is the notion or misconception that most
scholars, black and white, have in the West and the rest of
the world, namely, that theory is a purely typographical
form which is only possible as written discourse. This
notion, of course, stems from a limited or perverted
understanding of what the word actually means, its origins,
dynamics, evolution, even by Western standards. Aristotle’s
theories of drama were first and foremost, oral treatises,
lectures given publicly to students who wrote it down. The
thoughts, ideas and concepts did not become theories when
they were written down, they were theories even while he
was “thinking them out” or articulating them verbally as a
dialogic or Socratic discourse. This analogy of the link
between theory and orality becomes clearer when applied to
oral poetry which is quite different from verse i.e. poetry
as a written form, encrypted in Western orthography, as it
is widely known, practiced and valorized by the Western
academy. It is important to note that while verse is
struggling to survive in the West - when it does it is
mainly as among the university-educated, middle-class,
populations - oral poetry continues to thrive in three
quarters of the world as prayer, ritual, invocation, market
chants, songs, sermons, divination, political rhetoric,
praise singing, rap, spoken word etc. etc. I have tried to
theorize the reason for this vibrancy, accessibility and
functionality of oral poetry as well as its vernacular
imperative in a recent essay titled: “Taking the Bull by
the Balls: The Oriki Theory of African and African Diasporic
Orature."
Theory, to be precise, is an attempt to make sense of how
and why we create or make things, structures, ideas,
institutions, art in a given society. Its primary functions
are to encode, articulate, clarify, criticize, historicize,
assess, redirect, reshape, regenerate a society’s cultural
and creative processes from prayer, dance, painting,
literature through music to scientific invention. Theory
exists in all cultures of the world in the culture’s own
languages. Each cultures theoretical constructs can best be
appreciated by first studying the culture’s own languages
and metalanguages and then by placing their theories side by
side with the literary or performative artform or genre or
discipline being studied or examined by the theorist. And
that is what I intend to do, from an African diasporic
perspective, in the book: Before They Danced in Chains:
Performance Theories of Africa and the African Diaspora.”
In a recent essay titled, “To Cite or not to Cite,” Kofi
Agawu, distinguished professor of musicology at Princeton
University, USA, articulates the grouse of my argument
beautifully when he says about the present mendicant
situation of our scholarship and the politics of knowledge
in our world today: “But what of cultures that are
primarily oral, in which knowledge is preserved in memory
and disseminated through repeated performance, and where
scholarly texts necessarily assume a different mode of
material existence? If, as is widely recognized ,
sub-Saharan African cultures are for the most part primary
oral cultures, then some inflection of the metropolitan
practice will be needed in order to ensure full
participation by African workers….we might ask how one might
position scholarly requirements so that an unschooled but
thoroughly educated African sage is not by definition barred
from our knowledge producing game. As things stand
currently, you may be the most knowledgeable individual in
your town or village , know a lot about, say, instruments or
musical styles , or the symbolism of dance, or the history
of transmission of certain rituals. You may be well-
practiced and widely recognized as one who is uncommonly
knowledgeable. But if your knowledge is not committed to
paper , you may well not get credit for it. In fact, it is
nowadays likely that a Euro-American ethnomusicologist will
come and interview you and convey your knowledge and ideas
to a larger public in writing. During this ostensibly
collaborative process, your words and your transcribers may
become intertwined , leading ultimately to the latter’s
signing of the text. The deck is thus stacked in favour
of those who write not those who know. African sage
scholars are therefore automatically at a disadvantage as
soon as we accept the imperatives of a written tradition.”
10
(emphasis mine) Apparently, until lions tell their own
story, the story of hunting will always glorify the hunter.
In conclusion, this essay explores how a vernacular
redefinition of “theory” can change forever the linguistic
and epistemic angles from which people of African descent
participate in Western-derived theories. It addresses how an
African-diasporic notion of theory can produce an
alternative epistemology for the analysis and better
understanding of African/African Diasporic orature/literatures/performances.
It insists that we call postcolonial/postmodern theory, like
snow, has covered, for several centuries, a certain body
of theories created by Africans, through African orature, in
African languages, long before the advent of slavery or
colonialism. These theories are obscured because they stem
from orature whereas our theoretical practice both in the
West, the continent, and diaspora, is based primarily on
typographical literacy to the exclusion of iconographic,
kinaesthetic, sonic, proxemic, sartorial, tactile and many
other literacies which constitute the polysemic ingredients
and epistemological infrastructure through which three
quarters of the people of African descent on the continent
and the Diaspora create the performance texts, not literary
texts, that allow them to perform selves , pass on their
history, participate in a democratic way in aesthetic
structures created by their ancestors. Research and
fieldwork into these metalanguages, as I prefer to call
them, will enable us to find a theoretical continuum that
circumvents the teleologies of the postcolonial construct
and redefine theory from a diasporic, migratory, and
phenomenological perspective, away from the book-centred
concept of the Western academy. The master’s tools can never
demolish his house!
To be continued…11
NOTES
1. See
Mark Fortier, Theatre /Theory( London: Routledge,
1997), pp. 130-14
2.
Abiola Irele, “The African scholar”, in Transition,
No 51, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991, pp 56-69
3.
Ibid., 56-69
4.
Leela Ghandi, Post-Colonial Theory, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998)
5.
See Wole Soyinka, Myth , Literature and the African World,
London: Methuen, 1976.
6.
See Henry Louis Gates’ essay “Canon Formation, Literary
History, and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to
the Told”, in Falling in Theory edited by David
Richter New York: Bedford/St Martin’s , 2000), pp 175-182
7.
Gates, pp 175-182
8.
Gates, pp175-182
9.
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997, pp13.
10. This extraordinary and iconoclastic essay was first
presented on April 19, 2007, at the “Performing Africa
Conference , Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA. To catch up with his counterhegemonic thinking, Kofi Agawu recommends
that we read Kwesi Yankah: Globalization and the African
Scholar. Legon, Ghana: University of Ghana, 2004. On sage
philosophy, he recommends Henry Odera Oruka, Sage
Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African
Philosophy. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990).
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Esiaba Irobi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of International
Theatre/Cinema
School of Theatre
307 Kantner Hall,
Ohio University, Athens
USA |
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