RODOPI Syncretic Arenas: Essays on Postcolonial African Drama and Theatre for Esiaba Irobi: 177 (Cross/Cultures, 177)

This collection in part examines the legacy of the consummate Nigerian stage artist and scholar, Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010). Poems, tributes, and studies celebrate Irobi’s significance as actor, playwright, director, poet, and theatre theorist. Irobi’s life, temper, times, and career are inextricably linked to the history, development, concerns, and uses of drama and theatre in Africa. The contributions highlight the evolution of autochthonous theatrical practices: the interaction between Western and indigenous African performance traditions; colonial/postcolonial government policies and the mutations of drama and theatre (and critical commentary); the tensions inherent in postcolonial conceptions of history, identity, nationhood, and articulations of alternative aesthetics, pedagogies, and epistemologies for postcolonial African theatre; staging African plays in the West; and the constituencies of the contemporary African playwright and director. The strength of these studies derives primarily from nuanced examinations of the concerns and careers of particular African playwrights; the history, offerings, and fortunes of particular theatrical arenas, and close explorations of specific performances and texts. The foregrounding of correspondences in the dramaturgies and intellectual ferment of the continent critically accentuates equally privileged regional, historical, and other crucial specificities. Situated in time and place while underscoring the political and intellectual intersections of a shared history of colonialism, the contributions to Syncretic Arenas, individually and collectively, reveal the transformations and growing strengths of postcolonialism as an analytical strategy.