Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a significant and original contribution to the ongoing conversation on modernity. It uses the creative and critical works of Nigerian playwright and novelist Femi Euba to demonstrate the place and function of African cultures in modernity and makes the case for the vibrancy of such cultures in the shaping and constitution of the modern world. In addition to a critique of Euba's fifty-year artistic career, this book offers an account of Euba's formative relationship with the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Wole Soyinka, during the promising days of the Nigerian theatre in the immediate post-independence period, and the effect of this relationship on Euba's artistic choices and reflections. Euba contributes to our understanding of Africa's negotiation of modernity in significant ways, especially in his sensitive reading of Esu, the Yoruba god of fate and chance, as an artistic consciousness whose historical and ideological mobility during New World slavery, during Afr
Trade ReviewFew have meant more to the flowering of African and African American theater over the past half-century than the Nigerian actor, playwright, director, and scholar, Femi Euba. Now, thanks to Iyunolu Osagie’s brilliant study, we at last have an interpretive companion to Euba’s life and work that will make it possible not only to teach him within the context of his times, but to gain a deeper appreciation for what his art has revealed about the crossroads of tradition and modernity and the possibilities that exist for a dynamic past within a diasporic world. I have known Femi Euba since my days as a graduate student in Cambridge under the tutelage of our mentor Wole Soyinka, and I could not be more thrilled that his genius—for signification, satire, and so much more—is finally receiving the serious treatment it deserves. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba by Iyunolu Osagie deftly navigates the intellectual and cultural terrains that create the context for Femi Euba’s work. Her brilliant assessment of Euba’s formative role as a pioneer of Black Atlantic drama and criticism deepens our knowledge of the transnational ritual, social, and artistic entanglements situated in the African diaspora. The study also significantly adds to the body of work on the trickster deity Esu in its innovative, satiric, and wise analysis of this figure as a guide and muse. -- Solimar Otero, Louisiana State University
Table of ContentsForeword, by John Wharton Lowe Preface Chapter 1: Archetypes of Modernity Chapter 2: Tradition, Modernity, and the Axiological Present in The Gulf and The Eye of Gabriel Chapter 3: Black Theatre and the Politics of Adaptation in Dionysus of the Holocaust Chapter 4: Who Pulled the Trigger? Ritual Endings in Femi Euba’s A Riddle of the Palms, Crocodiles, and The Chameleon Chapter 5: Esu as Shape Shifting Word: Modernity, African Gnosis, and Global Reverberations in Camwood at Crossroads Afterword: The Performance of Culture Bibliography
