Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance.

Tejumola Olaniyan. Scars of Conquest/ Masks of Resistance. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 196 pp. $42.00 cloth/$16.95 paper.

In this brilliant study, Professor Olaniyan surveys the origins and parameters of African-based theatre through a history that has evolved over 300 years in Africa, America, and the Caribbean. Through a system of discourse analysis, he establishes what he perceives to be the three postures: the "hegemonic, Colonialist Eurocentric, the counter-hegemonic, anti-colonialist Afrocentric, and an emerging post-Afrocentric." Further, he assumes that, underlying the three separate discourses, are "two conceptual paradigms of cultural identity and difference: the expressive, with its rigid claims and oftentimes unexamined ethnocentric biases; and the performative, a self-critical model that conceives identity as open, interculturally negotiable, and always in the making--a process." Olyan attributes to the four playwrights included in his study a disposition toward "performative identity," and what he intends "is nothing less than an account of the social foundations of an aesthetic form, of the invention of a culturally situated `black' dramatic theory and practice."

In the first two chapters grouped under the heading "Contingent Origins," Olaniyan invokes early manifestations in the Western Hemisphere, such as the blackface minstrels in the U.S. as of the 1830s and camboulay of Trinidad (without mentioning bufo in Cuba, a related phenomenon), as evidence of African origins. He cites at some length Ruth Finnegan's supposedly canonical work that criticizes Africans for failing to develop a Eurocentric style of theatre. Her work, he points out, ironically coincides with the development of the Black Arts Movement in the United States and the publication of various anthologies and collected works designed to validate the black experience as a part of mainstream dramatic activity. Olaniyan also cites Wellek and Warren's statement that "every culture has its genres" in the effort to break the Eurocentric hold on generic forms, especially on tragedy, which critics traditionally find lacking in African drama. He discusses the importance of colonial languages in Africa and the difficulty of forming an anti-imperialist discourse within the imperialist language. Curiously, the colonial languages serve as a necessary evil to transcend culture imbedded in the indigenous languages.

The next four chapters are devoted to individual authors--Wole Soyinka, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Derek Walcott, and ntozake shange. In each essay Olaniyan applies the dual constructs of expressive and performative paradigms to explore the author's idiosyncrasies in establishing a black aesthetic. In his chapter on Nigeria's Nobel laureate, Olaniyan explores Soyinka's interpretation of the effects of European colonialism primarily through a deep analysis of the 1975 play Death and the King's Horseman, in which the central figure is a failed suicide under the traditional rules of conduct. Under the rubric of "race retrieval" (Soyinka's term), the figure of Elesin is seen as victimized by the dichotomy between the African dependence on Western epistemology and Soyinka's desire to return to Yoruba metaphysics. Olaniyan also explores the shift from African Marxist criticism of Soyinka, as expressed by such critics as Femi Osofisan, to an affirmation of African culture and perceptions, as embodied in the criticism of Biodun Jeyifo. This chapter on Soyinka underscores the overriding dichotomy between cultural and political influences that form the core of contemporary African perceptions.

In the chapter on LeRoi Jones (later, Amiri Baraka), subtitled "The Motion of History," Olaniyan explores Jones's rise from lower-middle-class "brown" through "yellow" to "white," and then his conversion in the early '60s, primarily under the influence of the Cuban Revolution, to a black identity. The critics who decry his politics at the expense of aesthetics describe him as a "revolutionary." Olaniyan interprets Baraka's commitment to political and cultural change within society through such plays as Dutchman (1964). Baraka assails the white concept of gender equality in favor of submissive women; and his suspicions of imperialism under any guise, although he adopts Marxism, ultimately lead him through political twists, fraught with ambiguities, between the expressive and performative modes, coming to rest in what Olaniyan describes as change.

The chapter "Islands of History at a Rendezvous with a Muse" focuses on the St. Lucian-born Derek Walcott, and emphasizes Walcott's perceptions of history as culture (his "history as myth") vis-a-vis history as politics (his "history as time"). Using Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) as a focal point, Olaniyan explores Walcott's Caribbean upbringing with its heterogeneous fusion of British imperialism and black identity as a springboard for Walcott's so-called "coherent deformation," a paradigm that allows for both the consistency and the differences between signs. Walcott's theatre depends heavily on his language, which is English and Creole (both French and English), a combination that nonetheless fails to transcend insular patterns. In sum, Olaniyan characterizes Walcott's theatre as a "culturalist" reading of the face-off between Western and African traditions.

In the chapter on ntozake shange, titled "The Vengeance of Difference, or the Gender of Black Cultural Identity," Olaniyan explicates the differences between her and the writers treated in the first three chapters on the basis of gender. Shange's focus is the black female, and for colored girls (1977) expresses in music and dance (as a choreopoem) the vicissitudes of a life subject not only to white dominance but, in many respects worse, black male dominance. The analogy to female resistance in Algeria during the period of French colonialism with its revolutionary practice sets a stage for the role of black females in shange's experience.

Olaniyan invokes Foucault, Barthes, and Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain), along with many others, as critical theorists on whom to rest analytical opinions about the authors and plays under consideration. He not only penetrates deeply into the subject, but he sustains a controlled balance between content and context, systematically adhering to his original premise of expressive versus performative issues. The focus on four authors (that excludes other black playwrights such as August Wilson, for example) allows an examination of the process of establishing black cultural identity within dominant Western language and theatrical traditions, which explains the book's title. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance is elegantly written, theoretically sophisticated, thoroughly documented, and stylistically superb. Olaniyan is to be commended for a fine piece of scholarship.