African Women & Representation: From Peformance to Politics

This book constitutes a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary analysis of sub-Saharan African women's plays and their contexts of origin. It examines how major Francophone and Anglophone women playwrights such as Werewere Liking (Cameroon/Ivory Coast), Tess Onwueme (Nigeria), Zulu Sofola (Nigeria), Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), and Efua Sutherland (Ghana) reflect on the conditions of (im)possibility of African women's representation in culture, society, and politics. By looking at these playwrights' works within the broader context of women's roles in African performances and theater, this study addresses the following questions: What are the local, national, and global structures that have undermined African women's self-representative autonomy? How have they represented themselves through traditional performances, colonial and postcolonial theatrical genres, and scripted drama? How do their changing representations within such performative spaces reflect their changing representations within social and political spaces from the pre-colonial to the postcolonial era? Research on women in African theater and on African women playwrights published to date remains limited and largely peripheral to the important body of scholarship devoted to the works of male African playwrights. Moreover, studies on African drama and performance tend to separate popular theater from scripted drama. This is the first book-length analysis to explore the works of both Anglophone and Francophone African women playwrights in relation to the history of African theater.