Shipley, Jesse Weaver, author.
Bloomington Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2015];©2015
Added to CLICnet on 04/27/2016
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Part of the series African expressive cultures;African expressive cultures.
Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-272) and index.
- Introduction: poetics of uncertainty — History and mediations in making theatre — Making culture : race, history, and a theory of performance in the Gold Coast colony — The national theatre movement : urban art infrastructures and a contested national culture in independence-era Accra — Revolutionary storytelling : Pan-African theatre and remaking lost futures in 1980s Ghana — A man of the people : Mohammed Ben Abdallah as artist-politician — Stagings in millennial Ghana — Total African theatre : language, reflexivity, and ambiguity in The witch of Mopti — The best tradition goes on : audience, consumption, and the structural transformation of Concert Party popular theatre — Fake pastors and real comedians : doubling and parody in miraculous, charismatic performance — Copying independence : backstage at the fiftieth-anniversary re-enactment of Nkrumah’s independence speech — Epilogue: unfreedom as critical theory.
- Trickster Theatre traces the changing social significance of national theatre in Ghana from its rise as an idealistic state project from the time of independence to its reinvention in recent electronic, market-oriented genres. Jesse Weaver Shipley presents portraits of many key figures in Ghanaian theatre and examines how Akan trickster tales were adapted as the basis of a modern national theatre. This performance style tied Accra’s evolving urban identity to rural origins and to Pan-African liberation politics. Contradictions emerge, however, when the ideal Ghanaian citizen is a mythic hustler who stands at the crossroads between personal desires and collective obligations. Shipley examines the interplay between on-stage action and off-stage events to show how trickster theatre shapes an evolving urban world. — Publisher’s description
Subjects:
- Theater — Ghana — History — 20th century.
- Theater and society — Ghana.
- Tricksters in literature.
- Ghana. fast (OCoLC)fst01208741
- 1900 – 1999 fast
- History. fast (OCoLC)fst01411628
Requested by Engen, D.