Ibadan Journal of European
Studies
Nos. 10 and 11:2010-2011
A Journal of the Department of European Studies 
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
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IBADAN JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN 
STUDIES (ISSN 1595-0344), a publication of the
Department of European Studies, University of Ibadan, is published once 
a year in November. Each issue is a Collection of original research 
papers on all aspects of European civilization, such as language, culture, 
linguistics, literature, history, politics and institutions including Modem 
European and African thoughts. The aim of the journal is to encourage 
scholarship in all its richness and diversity. The journal is formally 
recognized as a publication of international standards.
Advisory Board
Prof. Walderman Pfeiffer Gemiany
Prof. F.A. Irele Havard University, USA
Prof. Dapo Adelugba University of Ibadan
Prof. (Mrs) Biola Odejide University of Ibadan, Ado-Ekiti C J-
Prof. Flavien Gbeto Umversitcd’Abomey-Calavy,
Cotonou
Prof. S.O. Kolawole University of Ado-Ekiti, Ado-Ekiti 
Prof. R.A. Adebisi Ahmadu Bello University, Zana 
Dr. Yaroslav Koval Pushkin Institute, Russia
Editorial Board
Prof. (Mrs) Aduke Adebayo Chairperson
Prof. L.B. Ayeleru Editor
Dr. R.A. Sanusi Member
Dr. S.A. Ademuyiwa Member
Maria Akinduro Member
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Issue Editor
Prof. L.B. Ayeleru 
University of Ibadan, Ibadan
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All correspondence and contributions should be addressed to:
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Nigeria.
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Editorial Note
We are pleased to present issues 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 of the 
Ibadan Journal o f European Studies (IJES) to the public. There are 
thirty-one articles in this edition. The essays covering different 
areas like Language, Language Teaching, Linguistics and Applied 
Linguistics, Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies are well 
researched.
We must apologise for the delay in publication o f these issues. It is 
mainly due to the long peer-review process occasioned by the tight 
schedule o f our reviewers. While assuring you that the next issue 
will be promptly published, we sincerely believe that you will 
enjoy the articles which are carefully and meticulously selected for 
these issues.
L.B. Ayeleru
Professor o f French and Applied Linguistics
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Notes on Contributors
Elisabeth Fourn, Departement de Sociologie-Anthropologie, 
FLASH, UAC, Benin.
B. Sofela, Department of History, University o f Ibadan, Ibadan.
Gill Oluwatosin Adekannbi, Department of Classics, University 
of Ibadan, Ibadan.
Akin Ademuyiwa, Department of European Studies, University of 
Ibadan, Ibadan.
Joseph Eke, Department of European Studies, University of 
Ibadan,Ibadan.
Ohioma Ifounu Pogoson, Institute of African Studies, University of 
Ibadan, Ibadan.
Abiodun Akande, Emmanuel Alayande College of Education, Oyo.
Chuka Chukwube, Department of European Languages, 
University of Lagos, Akoka.
Aigbovia, Kessington, Department of European Languages, 
University of Lagos, Akoka.
Samuel Dipo Ajewole, Department of French, Ekiti State 
University (former UNAD), Ado-Ekiti.
Chijioke Uwasomba, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo 
University, Ile-Ife.
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Remy Oriaku, Department of English, University of Ibadan,
Ibadan.
Yakubu Adegboyega Adeoti, Department of European Studies, 
University of Ibadan, Ibadan.
Samson O. Olanisebe, Department of Religious Studies, Obafemi 
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
Adewale J. Adelakun, Department of Religious Studies, Obafemi 
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
Emmanuel B. Omobowale; Department of English, University 
Ibadan
Charles Cliff Feghabo; Department of English/Literary Studies, 
Niger Delta University
Sikiru Adeyemi Ogundokun, Department of Languages and 
Linguistics, College of Humanities and Culture, Ikire, Osun State 
University, Osogbo.
Felix Ayoh’Omidire, Department of Foreign Languages, Obafemi 
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife
Alani Souleymane, Department of European Studies, University of 
Ibadan, Ibadan.
Olaniyan Modupe Elizabeth, Department of English and Literary 
Studies, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti.
Adebayo Mosobalaje, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo 
Univeristy, Ile-Ife.
Folorunso Adebayo, Department of European Languages, Faculty 
of Arts, University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos.
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Tayo Lamidi, Department of English, University of Ibadan,
Ibadan.
Gbenga Fasiku, Department of Philosophy, Obafemi Awolowo 
University, Ile-Ife.
Okorie Ndukaku, Department of Philosophy, Obafemi Awolowo 
University, Ile-Ife.
Amos Damilare Iyiola, Department of European Studies, 
University o f Ibadan, Ibadan.
Isaac Nnarn Ohia, Department of Teacher Education, University 
of Ibadan, Ibadan.
Bankole O. Faloye, Department of English, College of Education, 
Ikere-Ekiti.
Ezekiel Olagunju, Department of Foreign Languages, Obafemi 
Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
Ajayi Samson Abiola, Department of Foreign Languages,
Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria.
‘Goke A. Akinboye, Department of Classics, University of 
Ibadan, Ibadan.
Lucy Jibrin, National Open University of Nigeria, Victoria Island, 
Lagos.
I.E. Arua, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, 
Ile-Ife.
Doyin Odebowale, Department of Classiscs, University of Ibadan, 
Ibadan.
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Eunice Faj obi, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo 
University, Ile-Ife.
Sola Olorunyomi, Institute of African Studies, University o f 
Ibadan, Ibadan
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Conceptualizing Continuity and Shifts in the African and the 
Black Diaspora Performance Traditions
*Sola Olorunyomi, PhD.
Institute of African Studies 
University of Ibadan, Ibadan 
Nigeria
“I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose 
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?”
Excerpt from: “A Far Cry from Africa”
—by Derek Walcott
Background
In engaging the challenge of evolving a shared pedagogy of Black 
and African knowledge systems on the continent and the African 
Diaspora(s), I come into this conversation simultaneously as a 
learner, student, teacher and an advisor — of Black and African 
performance traditions. I have benefited from researching and 
observing the methodology of popularising Black and African 
studies in Nigeria, Central America and the Caribbean; and, more 
recently, in North A nerica where I taught undergraduate and 
graduate courses on the broad theme of continuity and shifts in the 
Black and African performance traditions at Northwestern 
University, Evanston.
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To a large extent, Derek Walcott’s epigram at the beginning o f this 
essay hints at the intricacies lurked in the concept of continuity 
from assumed cultural templates. For one, there are no easy 
solutions, and neither standard nor charted paths to monitor 
cultural manifestations once off their moorings. And this is 
particularly informing with diaspora discourses, especially over 
time and space. Hence, the potential self-rupturing of the theme is 
duly acknowledged with a qualifier — “Shifts.” This qualifier 
demonstrates a strategy anchored on aspects of African ontology 
and metaphysics, and with reference to their emergent 
modernit(y)ies. This approach will, hopefully, serve the basis for 
an Africa-Diaspora pedagogical exchange by providing diverse 
possibilities of its own reading.
Introduction
This artiicle focuses on models of reading continuity and shifts in 
African drama and performance as well as the drama of the Black 
Diaspora. In broad terms, this includes texts (in script and 
performance) o f Black African, Caribbean and African-American 
literature. We proceed with an understanding that there are 
foundational, epistemological thought-systems nested in African 
and Diaspora folklore(s), some of which are evinced in the 
relativist and deconstructionist Esu, Ancmse and the mask 
paradigms already diffused in cultures across West Africa, the 
Caribbean and the United States of America.
It begins with an exploration of theoretical frames that can support 
the reading and staple oral rhetorical forms and the diverse 
masking traditions, with emphasis on their latent epistemic, literary 
and aesthetic qualities, before proceeding to examine selected
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literary and performance texts. The three literary texts to be 
examined are: Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests and Death 
and the King's Horseman, Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey 
Mountain, and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. It will elicit the 
embedded pedagogical potential of the chosen texts in relation to 
the readings afforded us by earlier scholars, particularly those of 
Harry Garuba and Tejumola Olaniyan who identify these texts as 
embodiments of tropes of continuity and shifts, besides the detailed 
biographical reading of Bruce King on Derek Walcott.
Hopefully, the chapter will shed light on how we can begin to 
appreciate the relationship between aspects of the Black experience 
as presented in African, Caribbean and African- American 
‘literatures’; demonstrate the historical, social, cultural, aesthetic 
and intellectual underpinnings of that experience, and express the 
diversity in its expression. Attention will be paid to the forms and 
styles o f the works under presentation, especially the ways they 
illustrate the complex relationship between the strategies of 
‘reading’ orality and writing in the respective literature(s). We 
could then proceed to examine the interrelatedness of culture and 
ideology in the context of postcolonial discourse.
Culture: Whose Culture and Ideology?
For the purpose of pedagogical engagement on African history and 
culture, it would be required to tease out the nuances of the 
sometimes overlapping concepts of culture and ideology. To 
transcend this bug, a good starting point would involve clarifying 
the related concept of culture and examining its modality with 
another concept-ideology. Raymond Williams (1983) in Keywords 
suggests that culture is “one of the two or three most complicated 
words in the English language” (87). This anxiety is hardly 
misplaced, for he then proceeds to articulate culture in terms of “a
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general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic 
development” (90); in other words, this can be related to the 
philosophical and aesthetic attitude of a people, including the 
works of its artists and writers.
The second suggestion indicates “a particular way of life, whether 
of a people, a period or a group” (90), while the last is related to 
‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic 
activity” (90). John Storey (1993) notes that this third use of 
culture is “synonymous with what structuralists and 
poststructuralists call ‘signifying practices” (2), and that the 
average sense of popular culture may be more related to the second 
and third concepts of the word culture-both as live cultures and 
cultural practices which would qualify as cultural texts.
As regards ideology, the primary problem arises because many 
scholars would even go as far as using it interchangeably with 
culture, and popular culture in particular. Stuart Hall (1978) 
cautions that there is a sense of emptiness in the term when used 
this way, a sense of emptiness which Storey suggests is “politics”, 
once we randomly substitute ideology for culture.
In the light of this, Storey ventures into clarifying five possible 
meanings o f the term ‘ideology’. One, he says, is to see ideology 
as “a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of 
people” (3); this could include a professional or a political group. 
The second relates to how a group could produce or foist false 
consciousness by masking, distorting, and concealing the social 
process of domestication by the privileged in society. The sub- text 
of this reading is best deduced from Karl Marx’s popular 
formulation on base and superstructure, and how the material 
culture could significantly shape social consciousness.
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Ideology, in this sense, points in the direction of power relations, 
and the third formulation by Storey actually derives from this. This 
is the sense of “society as conflictual rather than consensual,” with 
texts presumed to be taking sides, invariably, as in all the works of 
our case study. The fourth perspective is the Althurserian concept 
which tries, in the words of Storey, to “see ideology not simply as 
a body of ideas, but as a material practice” (5), while the fifth and 
last calls into play Roland Barthes’ preference of seeing ideology 
as operating at a connotative level, that is, “the secondary, often 
unconscious meanings, texts and practices carry or can be made to 
carry” (5).
In relation to our current study, a striking similarity noticeable in 
the treatment of the praxis of culture and ideology by the three 
authors under examination is the fact that they not only share a 
familiar platform in the medium of drama but also embed an 
insinuation and critique o f dominant paradigms through their 
dramaturgy. What is central here is that it is an alternative 
perspective, and so alternative that you could spell the word by 
introducing a hyphen to stress two lexical items: alter and native - 
Alter-Native, yet without being nativist by the sheer breadth of the 
dramatists’ cross-cultural referencing.
Against False Dilemma
There is the need to come into awareness o f another 
methodological constraint in relation to the question of African and 
Diaspora history and culture. It is actually what philosophers have 
sometimes described as “False Dilemma”. And in this case, it is 
tied to the tendency to canonise modes of strategic essentialisms in 
response to the Master-text. The Master-text, as approach, has been 
described as “arbitrary and idiosyncratic” in its penchant for 
blaming the victim, and making Africa and the Black world appear
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responsible for its own violation. Not just this, it comes with a 
baggage of reading the African Other in broad and sweeping 
generalisations, besides freezing it in a moment of the human 
evolution. Quite often, in rebutting this, many Africanists had in 
the past responded in like manner.
While we may understand the challenge o f such times in 
countering one essentialism with another, it must he remarked that 
this is insufficient in propagating, less evolving a pedagogy on 
African and its Diaspora cultural experiences. The impulse in 
reading continuity is itself prevalent upon the factor of denial 
and/or denigration of Black and African literature, and a few 
samples will serve. Melville Herskovits, who spent a considerable 
amount of his scholarly time rebuting pseudo-sciences of the 
academia, outlines five major constituents of the myth of the 
Negro past which is designed to validate the concept of Negro 
inferiority:
1) The negro is childlike in character;
(2) Only the less intelligent members of the race were enslaved;
(3) Since the slaves came from different parts of Africa and spoke 
different languages, they lost their identity and there was no 
common denomination of understanding among them;
(4) Even if there had been one, the superiority of European culture 
must have, and did cause them to give up this; and
(5) The Negro then is thus a man without a past.
Emotional response to such a claim is not enough. Such a response 
had been partly informed by a certain degree of epistemological 
anxiety and the lure o f resorting to normative African traditions in
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thought and fiction, on the part of such Africanists. In theorising 
the sell they had found themselves limited within the same 
categories created by proponents of the Master-text, rather than 
creatively mine aspects of the metaphysics, ontology and creative 
practices in the African cultural and literary experience, no matter 
how yet uneanonised such may be within the global matrix of 
knowledge production. Further constraints have been noticed in 
limiting oneself to race and the ideology of double-consciousness. 
It should be emphasised that race could be implicated in the 
debate, but there are legitimate forms of its use as well as modes o f 
its abuse as an ideological tool of discourse. But in the cultural 
politics o f identity, we are not unmindful that the subject may not 
just construct, but is herself constructed under circumstances 
external to her. True, race is a construct; but it is not a construction 
imposed by the subject. This is precisely the essence of Michael 
Echeruo’s counter to the postmodernist tendency to consider 
identity as a state of constant becoming. He is wont to stressing 
that identity is constituted not just from one’s choices, but also 
from choices imposed on the subject; and he says: “What the 
history o f the black diaspora teaches us is that black identity must 
always be predicated on black experience.”
Indeed, the Negro was also claimed to have arrived the new world 
with no more than his skin colour The literary responses to this 
profiling meant resorting to the corpus of Africanist aesthetic 
canons, and thereby reinforcing the constitutive aspects of 
continuity, in theme and style. In reaction to the dominance of the 
Euro-American critical tradition, Louis Henry Gates had stated: I 
once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon o f 
criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe that we must 
turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism 
indigenous to our literatures. (Louis Henry Gates Writing Race
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20). In The Signifying Monkey (xxxx), Gates traces one of the 
figures of continuity in the playful, trickster divinity, Esu, who is 
variously realised in:
Nigeria =5 Esu-Elegbara
Benin Republic = Legba
Brazil = Exu
Cuba = Echu Elegua
Haiti = Papa Legba
U.S. = Papa La Dos
The import of this, Louis Henry Gates describes as speaking 
“eloquently o f the unbroken arc of metaphysical presuppositions 
and patterns of figuration shared through space and time among 
black cultures in West Africa, South America, the Caribbean and 
the United States.”
Beyond continuity o f tradition, the evidence of shifts in the 
tradition is also evident in Gates’ identification of transmutation 
and codification elaboration, variation, addition, transformation 
and/or displacement. Here is an attempt to go beyond the notion of 
continuity of the African and the Black literary experience as: 
survival and retention from Africa; similarity of motifs, archetypes, 
and folk figures, or even....intertextuality.
Another helpful response to dealing with the issue is to combine 
the most relevant universal experiences in the discourse with 
grounded epistemic foundations of Black and African Studies/ 
Aesthetics. In this respect, two examples by Harry Garuba and 
Tejumola Olaniyan bear pertinence on the discourse of cultural
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continuity and shifts between Africa and its Atlantic Diaspora. 
Both readings share a postcolonial strain. While Olaniyan stresses 
and Labels the cultural politics o f hegemonic construction and its 
subversion, Garuba demonstrates the cultural manifestations of 
such identity shifts and their import on the creative experience. 
Both of them explore literary practices in Africa, the Caribbean 
and the United States. Harry Garuba derives his insight from the 
states and stages of the dramatic genre identifying moments of the 
primary, secondary and tertiary modes of textuality. Tejumola 
Olaniyan identifies moments of a colonial discourse embedded in 
the Master-text, its rebuttal in counter-hegemonic discourses and 
discursive practices, and a post-Afrocentric discourse.
Deriving from the conscious attempt to ignore the African literary 
heritage and create an amnesiac Middle Passage, the literature of, 
and on, Africa and its Diaspora since the late 19th Century has 
increasingly been allusive of the triad of race, colour and protest by 
many critics and scholars. Theme of continuity continues to feature 
in the following works attached as appendix.
Question of Textuality
In addition to this outlined approach, it could be helpful to 
commence a reading of the overarching theme of continuity in 
African drama and performance, and the drama of the Black 
Diaspora by first exploring staple oral rhetorical forms and the 
diverse masking traditions, with emphasis on their literary and 
aesthetic qualities, before proceeding to the examination of the 
selected literary and performance texts? This is particularly 
relevant because diverse critical traditions have examined and re­
examined the very core o f the concept of the text. Reading 
“continuity,” therefore, is integrally tied to the concept of the text 
and it is appropriate to commence by shedding some light on this.
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Let us begin by asking the seemingly mundane question(s): what is 
a text? What constitutes a text? There is the need to identify layers 
of the text, and the concept of textuality. Is there such a thing as 
the oral text, the written text, the performance and performed text 
(and text(s) in situation?).
An important starting point is to understand the predominant 
literary tradition in which we ask these questions, and that tradition 
is a literate tradition, a tradition that is not only aware of the 
manuscript but also the print culture. Many cultures and languages 
with a high degree of post-oral inflection would largely derive their 
concept of the text and literature from assumptions of the scribal. 
The English word “literature,” for instance, derives from the Latin, 
“Litera,” by and large suggesting the act of writing. This 
etymological root of literature, therefore, prepares us to encounter 
the text/literature as a written sign. Not only this, we conflate the 
written and the literary, further compounding basic understanding. 
What then happens to the vast semiotic coding inhered in the non­
verbal cues of our selected texts?
As Posteolonial Text
Three critical voices in the debate help to illuminate these 
performance traditions as modes of textuality and potential 
postcolonial modes of reading: Houston A. Baker (1993), Karin 
Barber (2005) and Meki Nwezi et al. (2001). Houston Baker warns 
that in engaging the performance text, we need a theoretical 
approach that is capable of an “improvisational flexibility and a 
historicising o f form...” (34). Although Baker’s primary attention 
was devoted to “popular cultural forms,” his emphasis was broadly 
on the oralist and non-verbal cues of those contexts. Karin Barber
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helps to trace the anxiety o f naming the performance event and the 
oral as text, noting the scriptocentric nature of our contemporary 
culture as its source, especially as pertains to using its yardsticks to 
measure the oral text. Barber suggests that the relationship between 
the text and so-called performance can be more engaging as, 
sometimes, “written texts can be cues, scripts, or stimulants to oral 
performance, and can also be records, outcomes, or by-products of 
it” (264). If  the claim to textuality of the written tradition is rested 
on mediation and detachment, Barber equally identifies in oral 
performance the co-existence of text in conventions, which are 
abstractions o f what gets to be performed as oral performance is 
not always mere instantaneity or pure evanescence of immediately 
disappearing acts.
Following up closely on this, Meki Nzewi et al. (2001) propose the 
concept “lingual text in music as song lyrics or recitative” (91) in 
describing the lingual fundamentals of African drum music. The 
authors persuasively demonstrate how the text in Black and 
African performance traditions can be encountered in the following 
ways:
(i) as a vocal processing of language — song;
(ii) as instrumental processing of language — metasong;
(iii) as choreographic processing of language the visual poetry 
of dance as metaphor;
(iv) as symbolic documentation of cultural statements —  the 
extramusical meaning of special music instruments and 
musical art costume. (91)
Furthermore, a scholar like Ademola Dasylva has demonstrated the 
import of trans-generic mutation in orally based creations, showing
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oral literature and its generic forms as essentially crosscutting and 
overlapping, even with their fresh contexts as written scripts. The 
illustration below by Dasylva stresses the point;
Poetry Prose
Drama
• Court Poetry Folkiale & Types, e.g.:
Festival
• Heroic Poetry Dilemma/Moral/Fairy
Ritual Drama & its Forms:
• Lullaby/Proverb Fable Sensuous.
Spirit Possession, Masquerade
• Work Song Proverb
Puppet Theatre, Revue
• Dirge/Rites of Riddle/Witticism
Travelling Passage Theatre
• Religious Poetry Witticism
Musical Drama
It should be noted that other cross-cutting modes include nonverbal 
forms like drum, costume and the general, extra-verbal cues. Add 
to this the fact that resources of all the genres are also drawn from 
the common pool of myth, legend and history. And in relation to 
dramatic action and drama proper, the four basic assumptions of 
speech —  even acted speech; movement — which may include the 
acted event and general gestures o f dance and enactment are 
present. This generic fluidity is evident in our chosen texts for this 
study.
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Proto-Hypertext in Carnivalesque?
The original concept of ‘hypertext’ was itself coined by Theodor 
Nelson to describe the non-linear, non-sequential space made 
possible by the computer,-while the carnivalesque was introduced 
to literature by Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to his study of 
heightened performance of the Middle Ages with the potential of 
an incipient multimedia accent. Sven Birkets (1994) copiously 
cites a description of the term ’hypertext’ in a New York Times 
Book Review entitled “The End o f Books” (June 21, 1992) by 
Robert Coover thus:
Hypertext is not a system but a generic term, coined a quarter of a 
century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe 
the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made 
possible by the computer. Moreover, unlike print text, hypertext 
provides multiple paths between text-segments, now often called 
Texias’ in a borrowing from the pro-hypertextual but prescient 
Roland Barthes. With its web o f linked lexias, its networks of 
alternate routes (as opposed to print’s fixed unidirectional page­
turning) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, 
interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over 
definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the 
author. Hypertext readers and writers are said to become co­
learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow travellers in the mapping 
and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic, and aural 
components, not all of which are provided by what used to be 
called the author (153).
While the hypertext has more immediate bearing on the electronic 
condition, there are sufficient examples to indicate that aspects of 
the performance traditions being explored, especially Wole 
Soyinka and Derek Walcott’s, bear close affinity to proto hypertext
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features as regards modes of [mask] narration and reception of 
performance text. This becomes most evident in moments 
approximating to the carnivatesque, to appropriate Mikhail 
Bakhtin’s term. Particularly with Soyinka and Walcott, we 
experience a heightened performance context which is highly 
ingested with a prescient tone of the carnivalesque played out in 
diverse forms, and one intermingled with song, music, and the 
extra-verbal features of gesture, costume, mask display, dance, 
mime, and excessive revelry; in short, a simultaneous staging of an 
apparently dissonant but deeply interactive segments. The 
moonlight fantasy-play template of Walcott’s Dream alerts us on 
this aspect o f revelry, just as much as the market scenes in 
Soyinka’s Death. The constant shift from real to imaginary time in 
the prison scenes’ experience of Makak in Dream, and the 
evolving plains o f the world of the living and the dead in both of 
Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and A Dance of the 
Forests are quite telling on non-sequential, non-chronological 
narrative import o f the proto-hypertext in cultural manifestation.
The concept o f the carnivalesque was popularised by Mikhail 
Bakhtin who, in “Rabelais and His World,” equated the form to a 
second-order semiotic system, and as he puts it, “Carnival is the 
people’s second life, organised on the basis of laughter” (Rivkin 
and Ryan ed., 1998:45). Bakhtin came to this conclusion by 
studying the festivity of the Middle Ages that exhibited “peculiar 
qualities o f all comic rituals and spectacles ...” (45). He links the 
festival, at the external level, to the feast of the church, but avers 
that all carnivals o f the Middle Ages (ecclesiatic, feudal or state- 
sponsored, led to any form beyond a replication of the existing 
world order. In other words, they merely endorsed “the norm, 
thereby betraying true human festivity” (45). For him, the official
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feast, in celebrating normative truth, was invariably devoid o f the 
tone of laughter, thereby betraying any true human festivity.
However, unlike the official feast, the carnival celebrated 
temporary liberation from the stricture of prevailing truth. The true 
carnival strove beyond inhibitions to embrace open spaces rather 
than enclosures, the borderless zone rather than boundaries, and a 
penchant to dehierachisize and query prevailing order in the course 
of the carnival. This mode sharply contrasted to the official feast 
that, more or less, was a “consecration of inequality” (45). At a 
deeper level, the carnival enthroned an intersubjective space to 
which all participants could claim ownership, not just at an 
ideational level but evinced in real-life experience. It is this form 
of abundant spiritual excess, similar to the mode of representation 
found in Rabelais’ novel —  Penragruel — that Bakhrin describes 
as carnivalesque. This form of ‘speak back’ to power, authority, 
and heirarchy is common in traditional festivals of poetic licence 
from which the dramatists presumably drew. This is besides the 
potentially ribald atmosphere replete with high burlesque, and an 
exaggerated form o f  representation, not necessarily of the 
individual but human corporate being in a flux. The ultimate 
intentions o f the Bakhtinian ‘true’ carnival might not have been 
fully played out in our chosen texts, but the three authors 
metaphorically appropriate it by their conscious relativisation of 
cultural experience and insidious challenge of all orthodoxies 
strewn in their path.
We must bear in mind that the nature of transposition of the mask 
code need not be direct because the mask — even as an ideational 
category — does not offer itself to a simple, literal interpretation. 
The process of deriving meaning from the mask in a dramaturgic 
sense is such that once the mask has been foregrounded as the
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primary genre, as Harry Garuba (1988) notes, “a dramatic genre 
can then be constructed from its code” (45). Indeed, Garuba 
suggests that the mask in this sense serves as a crucial enabling 
conceptual metaphor of African and Black drama. The dramatists’ 
re-enactment of ritual through song and drama in their plays does 
not necessarily attempt to faithfully recapture those idioms in their 
pristine states. In his treatment, such performances have been 
revised and transformed into modes of cross-cultural expression o f 
contemporary global experience.
Transforming the Mask
Using the mask idiom of the Oyo-Yoruba, Nigeria, as an example, 
Harry Garuba demonstrates how the mask can be reconstituted in 
dramaturgic terms. He suggests three conceptual layers of the mask 
idiom, moving from direct, denotative relationships of the primary 
to the more abstracted uses of the same idiom at the secondary and 
tertiary levels by contemporary playwrights.
Primary: The representation of mask idiom in the Yoruba Apidan 
Phase (travelling theatre) was traced back to its cultural subsoil of 
the 17th Century in the old Oyo Empire. This phase embodied a 
large dose of spectacle (idan), mime, song, dance, and acting at a 
primordial level. He also emphasised the different phases of the 
development, leading up to the emergence o f professional guilds, 
and one that eventually included the four-act performance 
structure.
Secondary: Other masks in literary drama (Death and the King’s 
Horseman). This is preceded by the playwright’s research on 
traditional dramatic forms. The emergence o f the 1960 Ibadan 
masks as a new cognitive idiom for theatrical expression. In his 
essay, “From a Common Back Cloth...” Soyinka had said: “A very
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long time ago, the discerning African rejected the anthropological 
novel. Perhaps during the next twenty years his foreign counterpart 
will do the same. Since even now African writers work against a 
similar back cloth, it is on the level of interpretation that the 
individual artist, as in any other culture, must be judged (389- 
390).”
Garuba shows how the mask in this phase reinvokes the logic that 
the body is a temporal mask of the soul, noting that bringing the 
spirit back after the departure of the soul requires another masking 
device. In this effort, cross-cultural influence was evident in the 
fusion o f the mimetic and the mask code. At this point, the mask 
had been discarded as a direct cognitive aid, but conceptually 
incorporated in the play. And this fusion is most evident in 
experimental A Dance and its triple trajectory, which relived: one, 
The dead as characters, two, The dramatic structure of Ijuba, and 
three subversion of the principle of suspension of disbelief.
Tertiary: Extension of the idiom — Dream on Monkey Mountain 
and Dutchman by Derek Waicott and LeRoy Jones (Amiria 
Baraka). Here, Walcott affirms the theme of continuity in cross- 
cultural terms by noting that “Maturity is the assimilation of the 
features of every ancestor, “while Jones structures Dutchman in 
journey motif. Earlier experimentation by Caribbean writers had 
been decidedly weighed towards the European influence. Dream 
on Monkey Mountain, it was, that came to reconfigure this strategy 
of telling, showing and experiencing. In what Garuba describes as 
a transformation into a modal (tertiary) form, we find a sharp 
distinction from the earlier modes. While the primary genre may 
require the possibility of visual metamorphoses deriving from the 
use of the mask, the secondary phase merely depicted the element 
of metamorphoses through the figurative and impersonation —
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with the primary genre becoming “an object of imitation.” At the 
tertiary level and movement from the second to this third phase (as 
with Dream), the artist no longer needs to adhere strictly to the 
technical criteria (or prescription) of the genre, but rather 
incorporates within the work the informing essence of the 
discourse.
The evolving form of the mask genre in phases (Primary- 
Secondary-Tertiary) was broadly represented below) by Harry 
Garuba (1988) along the structures of Presentational Style, Action, 
Time Structure, Characterisation and Audience Response:
Reading Conceptual Codes and Conventions of Continuity: 
Two Traditions and conventions in the aesthetic continuum
• The Mask code vs. The Mimetic code
A. The Mimetic code: B. The Mask code:
1. Presentational Style
Mimesis/Illusionism/Immitation Representation Incarnation/ 
Metamorphosis / Event 
Presentation
2. Action
Realistic/Plausible story, plot/ Realistic and unrealistic 
Causality/Unity of plot/ stories! / Episodes/ 
Sequentiality/Conflict/Resolution!/ Juxtaposition/Conceptual 
Closure/Unity of action Unity/ Multidimensionality/ 
Situation/
Exposition/Situation/ 
Openendedl/ Encyclopedic 
scope of action
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3. Time Structure
Linearity set in historical time/ Simultaneity/Set in historical 
Time span of events in the and non-historical time/ Time 
play=time-span indicated by the span of events in the play
Action often= time span of 
performance
4. Characterization
Individuals/Psychological Types/ Character in relation to 
exploration in character event or situation/ Actor may 
development/ Actor and assume other masks/ Play- 
character are one Personae/ other-roles
5. Audience Reaction
Suspension o f disbelief/ Non- Participatory/Chorus
participatory
Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony
Tejumola Olaniyan (1995) in Scars o f Conquest/Masks o f 
Resistance..., engages the continuity and shift debate by examining 
the critical foundations of the informing creative process of each of 
the playwrights. Besides other references, he engages Soyinka’s - 
“African Worldview” in “The Fourth Stage,” Derek Walcott, in 
“What the Twilight Says,” and LeRoi Jones (Amiria Baraka) in 
“The Motion o f History.”
Olaniyan locates the value of the concept “Discourse” in 
explaining this sense of difference amongst the different authors. 
He resorts to Foucault in identifying “Discourse”, as not merely “a 
violence that we do to things... [but] a practice that we impose 
upon them,” noting further... the domain of violence at the human-
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interactive level, imposed through “the complexes of signs and 
practices which organise social existence and social reproduction.”
In appraising Baraka’s “The Motion of History”, he weaves it 
— around the author’s activism, aptly comparing him to a “Che 
Without a Jungle.” He notes, furthermore, that what we are faced 
with in Baraka, therefore, (69) is “not his dogmatism, literalism, 
penchant for politics and propaganda...but... .is Fanon’s irreverent, 
unassimilable Negro who is needed, demanded, and quested for if 
only ‘he’ would allow himself to be made palatable...” For one, 
Baraka refused to accept the Manichean divide “between literature 
and non-literature, art and politics, (69) “literary writer and 
“political pamphleteer,” genre and history, value and its material 
and historical determinants, and the scholar and the activist or the 
intellectual and politician.” (Baraka, 17) It seems like the (70): 
“...vision governing Baraka’s work is that of art as practice.” And 
there is a sense in which Baraka’s transformation(s) conforms, 
very closely to the journey motif o f his play, Duthman: himself 
journeying through name and ideological transit camps - 
Bohemian-Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung-Feminist. This paradox 
o f consistence in change, Baraka had once described as “The 
Changing Same.” This merely affirms his view that discourse goes 
beyond the monologic as it can at once be multiple and 
contradictory.
Olaniyan’s interpretation o f the oeuvre of the manufacture of post­
imperial dramaturgic subjectivity comes quite strongly. And to 
illustrate this, he somewhat assembles three distinct discursive 
formations: a hegemonic-Colonialist-Eurocentric discourse versus 
an anticolonialist, Afrocentric counter-discourse, and a once anti­
colonialist and post-Afrocentric discursive formation.
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In relation to the authors, Olaniyan suggests two modes of 
articulating difference: the expressive and performative. While the 
expressive, harbouring ethnocentric bias, does little in engaging 
difference, the performative acknowledges identity as multiple and 
negotiates the intercultural experience. He goes further to suggest 
Barbara Ann Teer’s word-concept “decrudian”, to characterise 
Baraka’s construction o f an African-American cultural identity. A 
process (71), according to Olaniyan, of refusing subjection and 
reforming subjectivity...” He cites W.J. Harris’s suggestion that 
Baraka’s method is similar to the process of jazz composition, 
which includes (p31) inversion, mutilation, repetition, parody, 
rejection, extremism, signifying, and complex fusion, and all 
utilised in relation to the dominant.
The biography is a crucial way of evolving a pedagogy, and 
Olaniyan maximises this in exploring the literary biography of the 
trio in relation to aesthetic response. He details Baraka’s struggle 
with the complex of colour and the hierarchy of shades along the 
rungs o f whiteness-yellowness-brownness-blackness. In relation to 
Soyinka and Walcott, he notes that both have suffered the charge 
of Eurocentricism, but suggests that a productive way to identify 
their ambiguity lies in the apprehension of utilisation of difference 
by a figure like Soyinka. He however notes the ambiguity between 
the portraiture o f class and gender in his plays as against the denial 
of appropriateness of same in his essays. And for Derek Walcott, 
he suggests a distinction between the former’s treatment of history 
as distinct from his engagement with culture not as politics. For the 
three authors, he notes a similar passion, but different articulation 
under different but related cultures. His preference is on how to 
draw attention NOT to sameness but diverse modes by which the 
playwrights respond to the, often, similar socio-historical contexts 
of their works and existence., .as all share historical
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subjection... with originally violent, and yet assertion of 
subjectivity...
In Dutchman, he notes the bipolarity articulation of Clay by Lula, 
who divides him into two frames: Clay the ‘individual’ and Clay, 
the ‘genius’, black middle class. She, Lula, knows everything 
about the latter but very little about the former —  since (78) “the 
genius is the realm of seeping frameworks and frozen identities, 
while the individual is the field in/of motion.” Frozen identities: 
slave/ descendant of a slave/black (genus) middle class/white 
prebendal (A black Baudelaire)/ Minstrelsia.
A Sample Recommendation of Course Description
Deriving from the above, a course could be derived on models of 
reading continuity in African drama and performance, and the 
drama o f the Black Diaspora. In broad terms, this could include 
texts (in script or performance) of Black Africa, the Caribbean and 
African-American literature.
It could begin with an exploration of staple oral rhetorical forms 
and the diverse masking traditions, with emphasis on their literary 
and aesthetic qualities, before proceeding to the examination o f the 
selected literary and performance texts. The course instructor and 
students would find it most rewarding with such texts as Wole 
Soyinka’s A Dance o f the Forests, Death and the K ing’s 
Horseman, Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, and 
LeRoi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka’s) Dutchman. The course could also 
conclude with the song-text performance of African music, reggae 
and/or calypso tradition, as embodiments of the tropes of this 
continuity.
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In one such tested case study (2007), at the Northwestern 
University, Evanston-Illinois, students were able to appreciate the 
relationship between aspects of the Black experience as presented 
in African, Caribbean and African-American ‘literatures’; the 
historical, social, cultural, aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings 
of that experience, and the diversity in its expression. They equally 
came to appreciate the forms and styles of the works under study, 
especially the ways they illustrate the complex relationship 
between orality, cultural studies/popular culture, and literature.
Conclusion
There is no set method for evolving the pedagogy o f African and 
Diaspora history and culture; so, an insightful starting point would 
suggest a review of past curriculum theories and practices.
It is important . to note that the creative process, in spite of its 
communal sensibilities and environmental influence, remains an 
intensely private domain of experience. It is in this context that this 
presentation has stressed the diverse theoretical possibilities that 
can attend to the subject matter as well as tease out evidence of the 
theme and style of continuity in dramaturgic terms. Beyond the 
continuum, however, it is apt to identify the constant shifts across 
time and space within the individual and collective oeuvre of the 
playwrights under examination.
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