Nadia Anwar analyzes selected post-independence Nigerian dramas using the conceptual framework of metatheatre, a theatrical strategy that foregrounds the process of play-making by breaking the dramatic illusion. She argues that distancing, as a function of metatheatre, creates a balanced theatrical experience and environment in terms of the emotive and cognitive levels of reception of a particular performance. Anwar's book is the first in-depth study to apply the concept of metatheatre to Nigerian drama. She brings the perspectives of Bertolt Brecht, Thomas J. Scheff, and other theoreticians of dramatic distancing to the analysis of plays by authors such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan, Esiaba Irobi, and Stella ‘Dia Oyedepo.

The goal of this book is to initiate theoretical discussions on the popular subject of African literary language, and the thrust of the contribution, apart from theory-building, is the introduction of the Post-indiginist concept next to the well known essentialist and hybrid concepts. The study outlines a set of criteria for each aesthetic concept, so that literary analysis based on the criteria will verify whether or not they are adequate for understanding, explaining and describing African writers' language usage. It is expected that a language aesthetic theory in the African context may help in the study of individual writers' styles and equally address a neglect of descriptive studies in African literary scholarship.

Examines the impact of new media (such as video and YouTube) and the use of multi-media on live and recorded performance in Africa. Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Includes contributions on dance; popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon; the interface between live performance and video (or still photography), and links between on-line social networks and new performance identities. As a group the articles raise, from original angles, the issues of racism, gender, identity, advocacy and sponsorship. Volume Editor: DAVID KERR is Professor of English in the University of Botswana, and is the author of African Popular Theatre Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick

Many African countries achieved independence from their colonisers over five decades ago, but the people and the continent largely remain mere spectators in the arena of their own dance. The post-independence states are supposed to be sovereign, but the levers of economic and political powers still reside in the donor states. Not in many fora is the complex reality that defines Africa more trenchantly articulated than in imaginative literature produced about and on the continent. This is the crux of the essays collected in African Literature and the Future. The book reflects on Africas past and present, addressing anxieties about the future through the epistemological lens of literature. The contributors peep ahead from a backward glance. They dissect the trend and tenor of politics and their impact on the socio-cultural and economic development of the continent as portrayed in imaginative writings over the years. One salient feature of African literature is the close affinity between art and politics in its polemics. This is well established in all the six essays in the book as the authors stress the interconnections between literature and society in their textual analyses. On the whole, there is an overwhelming feeling of angst and pessimism, but the authors perceive a glimmer of hope despite daunting odds, under different conditions. Thus, they depict the plausible fate of Africa in the twenty-first century, as informed by its ancient and recent past, gleaned from primary texts.

Beginning from an auteur standpoint, this book interrogates extant cinematic re-presentation of African and Nigerian postcolonial realities in Nollywood. It makes a case, using Kunle Afolayan's The Figurine, for a critical space-clearing gesture around the notion of a neo-Nollywood, which transcends the formulaic cinematic re-presentation of African and Nigerian realities to embrace a visionary and philosophic rearticualtion of the role of film-making, and of Nollywood, in the Nigerian imagination. The Idea of neo-Nollywood, and a visionary director, therefore stands at the core of a cinematic production process that challenges, disturbs and stimulates perceptions of current and future African identities

This book explores contemporary African adaptations of classical Greek tragedies. Six South African and Nigerian dramatic texts – by Yael Farber, Mark Fleishman, Athol Fugard, Femi Osofisan, and Wole Soyinka – are analysed through the thematic lens of resistance, revolution, reconciliation, and mourning. The opening chapters focus on plays that mobilize Greek tragedy to inspire political change, discussing how Sophocles’ heroine Antigone is reconfigured as a freedom fighter and how Euripides’ Dionysos is transformed into a revolutionary leader. The later chapters shift the focus to plays that explore the costs and consequences of political change, examining how the cycle of violence dramatized in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy acquires relevance in post-apartheid South Africa, and how the mourning of Euripides’ Trojan Women resonates in and beyond Nigeria. Throughout, the emphasis is on how playwrights, through adaptation, perform a cultural politics directed at the Europe that has traditionally considered ancient Greece as its property, foundation, and legitimization. Van Weyenberg additionally discusses how contemporary African reworkings of Greek tragedies invite us to reconsider how we think about the genre of tragedy and about the cultural process of adaptation. Against George Steiner’s famous claim that tragedy has died, this book demonstrates that Greek tragedy holds relevance today. But it also reveals that adaptations do more than simply keeping the texts they draw on alive: through adaptation, playwrights open up a space for politics. In this dynamic between adaptation and pre-text, the politics of adaptation is performed.