Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review
Trickster Theatre is a tremendously valuable contribution to the growing literature on Ghanaian and African theater and to performance studies in general.
* American Ethnologist *
Thoroughly researched, and supplemented by Shipley's own remarkable fieldwork as both chronicler and performer within the history, this is one of the most sophisticated and thorough volumes on African performance in recent memory. With its rich discussion of millennial Ghanaian performance, this rich primary source is a model of scholarship. . . . Essential.
* Choice *
Trickster Theatre not only appeals to scholars of theatre, anthropology, African performance, and Ghanaian and Nigerian history and politics, it also speaks to scholars of colonialism, postcolonial studies, and the cultural politics and legacies of the Cold War. It highlights the ways in which colonial education shaped ideas about the arts in national development.
* The Drama Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Poetics of Uncertainty
Part I. History and Mediations in Making Theatre
1. Making Culture: Race, History, and a Theory of Performance in the Gold Coast Colony
2. The National Theatre Movement: Urban Art Infrastructures and a Contested National Culture in Independence-Era Accra
3. Revolutionary Storytelling: Pan-African Theatre and Remaking Lost Futures in 1980s Ghana
4. A Man of the People: Mohammed Ben Abdallah as Artist-Politician
Part II. Stagings in Millennial Ghana
5. Total African Theatre: Language, Reflexivity, and Ambiguity in The Witch of Mopti
6. "The Best Tradition Goes On": Audience, Consumption, and the Structural Transformation of Concert Party Popular Theatre
7. Fake Pastors and Real Comedians: Doubling and Parody in Miraculous, Charismatic Performance
8. Copying Independence: Backstage at the Fiftieth-Anniversary Reenactment of Nkrumah's Independence Speech
Conclusion: Unfreedom as Critical Theory
Notes
Bibliography
Index
