African Dionysus

Author : Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2010-03-22
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0786451599

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Black Dionysus by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Pdf

Many playwrights, authors, poets and historians have used images, metaphors and references to and from Greek tragedy, myth and epic to describe the African experience in the New World. The complex relationship between ancient Greek tragedy and modern African American theatre is primarily rooted in America, where the connection between ancient Greece and ancient Africa is explored and debated the most. The different ways in which Greek tragedy has been used by playwrights, directors and others to represent and define African American history and identity are explored in this work. Two models are offered for an Afro-Greek connection: Black Orpheus, in which the Greek connection is metaphorical, expressing the African in terms of the European; and Black Athena, in which ancient Greek culture is "reclaimed" as part of an Afrocentric tradition. African American adaptations of Greek tragedy on the continuum of these two models are then discussed, and plays by Peter Sellars, Adrienne Kennedy, Lee Breuer, Rita Dove, Jim Magnuson, Ernest Ferlita, Steve Carter, Silas Jones, Rhodessa Jones and Derek Walcott are analyzed. The concepts of colorblind and nontraditional casting and how such practices can shape the reception and meaning of Greek tragedy in modern American productions are also covered.

Author : Muata Ashby
Publisher : Sema Institute
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2006-01-30
Category : History
ISBN : 188456447X

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African Dionysus by Muata Ashby Pdf

33. AFRICAN DIONYSUS: FROM EGYPT TO GREECE: The Kamitan Origins of Greek Culture and Religion ISBN: 1-884564-47-X FROM EGYPT TO GREECE This insightful manual is a reference to Ancient Egyptian mythology and philosophy and its correlation to what later became known as Greek and Rome mythology and philosophy. It outlines the basic tenets of the mythologies and shoes the ancient origins of Greek culture in Ancient Egypt. This volume also documents the origins of the Greek alphabet in Egypt as well as Greek religion, myth and philosophy of the gods and goddesses from Egypt from the myth of Atlantis and archaic period with the Minoans to the Classical period. This volume also acts as a resource for Colleges students who would like to set up fraternities and sororities based on the original Ancient Egyptian principles of Sheti and Maat philosophy.

Author : Daniel Orrells,Gurminder K. Bhambra,Tessa Roynon
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2011-10-27
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780191618796

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African Athena by Daniel Orrells,Gurminder K. Bhambra,Tessa Roynon Pdf

The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

Author : Iyunolu Osagie
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2017-06-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498545679

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African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba by Iyunolu Osagie Pdf

This 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 Africa’s colonial period, and in the manifestations in the black diaspora today emblematizes the process we call modernity. By using ritual, myth, and satire as avenues to the debate on modernity, Euba lays emphasis on the transformative possibilities at the crossroads of history. His works engage the psychological interconnections between old gods and new worlds and the dialogic relationship between tradition and modernity. Delineating the philosophical and literary debates that reject an easy division between a stereotypically traditional Africa and a modern West, the author shows how Euba’s plays and novel engage the entwined and intimate relationships between the modern and the traditional in contemporary Africa, and thereby she asserts the global resonance of Euba’s African, and specifically Yoruba, conception of the world. By meticulously collecting, cataloguing, and critiquing Euba’s works, Osagie models a new way of practicing African literary studies and invites us to glimpse narrative genius on the continent that she firmly believes African scholars should both promote and celebrate.

Author : Theo D’haen,Iannis Goerlandt,Roger D. Sell
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2015-09-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027268549

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Major versus Minor? – Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World by Theo D’haen,Iannis Goerlandt,Roger D. Sell Pdf

Do the notions of “World Lingua Franca” and “World Literature” now need to be firmly relegated to an imperialist-cum-colonialist past? Or can they be rehabilitated in a practical and equitable way that fully endorses a politics of recognition? For scholars in the field of languages and literatures, this is the central dilemma to be faced in a world that is increasingly globalized. In this book, the possible banes and benefits of globalization are illuminated from many different viewpoints by scholars based in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. Among their more particular topics of discussion are: language spread, language hegemony, and language conservation; literary canons, literature and identity, and literary anthologies; and the bearing of the new communication technologies on languages and literatures alike. Throughout the book, however, the most frequently explored opposition is between languages or literatures perceived as “major” and others perceived as “minor”, two terms which are sometimes qualitative in connotation, sometimes quantitative, and sometimes both at once, depending on who is using them and with reference to what.

Author : John Burt Foster Jr.
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 490 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400886128

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Heirs to Dionysus by John Burt Foster Jr. Pdf

Building on recent transformative theories of influence, John Foster explores the many ways Nietzsche's intellectual and artistic example helped shape an interconnected series of major literary projects from 1900 to the 1940s. He portrays Nietzsche as a stimulating but disturbing force who left a well-defined legacy of concerns that modernists appropriated for their fiction. The author focuses particularly on Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Malraux, and Mann, analyzing their strategies of acceptance, revision, and subversion. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Patrice D. Rankine
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2008-12-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780299220037

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Ulysses in Black by Patrice D. Rankine Pdf

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca. Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Author : Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2001-11-14
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0786410930

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The Athenian Sun in an African Sky by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Pdf

Western literature has become more influential in Africa since the independence of many of that continent's countries in the early 1960s. In particular, Greek tragedy has grown as model and inspiration for African theatre artists. This work begins with a discussion of the affinity that modern-day African playwrights have for ancient Greek tragedy and the factors that determine their choice of classical texts and topics. The study concentrates on how African playwrights transplant the dramatic action and narrative of the Greek texts by rewriting both the performance codes and the cultural context. The methods by which African playwrights have adapted Greek tragedy and the ways in which the plays satisfy the prevailing principles of both cultures are examined. The plays are The Bacchae of Euripides by Wole Soyinka, Song of a Goat by J.P. Clark, The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi, Guy Butler's Demea, Efua Sutherland's Edufa, Orestes by Athol Fugard, The Song of Jacob Zulu by Tug Yourgrau, Femi Osofisan's Tegonni, Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Odale's Choice, The Island by Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and Sylvain Bemba's Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone.

Author : Barbara Goff,Michael Simpson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2007-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780199217182

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Crossroads in the Black Aegean by Barbara Goff,Michael Simpson Pdf

A study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy, this title asks why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle are so often adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past can articulate the postcolonial moment.

Author : Astrid Van Weyenberg
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : History
ISBN : 9789401209571

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The Politics of Adaptation by Astrid Van Weyenberg Pdf

This book explores contemporary African adaptations of classical Greek tragedies. Six South African and Nigerian dramatic texts – by Yael Farber, Mark Fleishman, Athol Fugard, Femi Osofisan, and Wole Soyinka – are analysed through the thematic lens of resistance, revolution, reconciliation, and mourning. The opening chapters focus on plays that mobilize Greek tragedy to inspire political change, discussing how Sophocles’ heroine Antigone is reconfigured as a freedom fighter and how Euripides’ Dionysos is transformed into a revolutionary leader. The later chapters shift the focus to plays that explore the costs and consequences of political change, examining how the cycle of violence dramatized in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy acquires relevance in post-apartheid South Africa, and how the mourning of Euripides’ Trojan Women resonates in and beyond Nigeria. Throughout, the emphasis is on how playwrights, through adaptation, perform a cultural politics directed at the Europe that has traditionally considered ancient Greece as its property, foundation, and legitimization. Van Weyenberg additionally discusses how contemporary African reworkings of Greek tragedies invite us to reconsider how we think about the genre of tragedy and about the cultural process of adaptation. Against George Steiner’s famous claim that tragedy has died, this book demonstrates that Greek tragedy holds relevance today. But it also reveals that adaptations do more than simply keeping the texts they draw on alive: through adaptation, playwrights open up a space for politics. In this dynamic between adaptation and pre-text, the politics of adaptation is performed.

Author : Ce, Chin,Smith, Charles
Publisher : Handel Books
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2014-04-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789783708563

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Counter Discourse in African Literature by Ce, Chin,Smith, Charles Pdf

This volume charts the widening frontiers of black literary aesthetics using the prose and dramatic fictions of writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The chapters come in two interactive phases of current critical discourses involving rejoinders from past-present concerns and issues of cultural and contemporary modernity. These studies stress the argument that African literature is hardly discussed outside contemporary history and that the reason for the apparent disconnection among groups in Africa and the diaspora can be traced to the disparate elements within the continent and diaspora.

Author : James Moran
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2023-02-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781350139794

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Modern Tragedy by James Moran Pdf

What distinguishes modern tragedy from other forms of drama? How does it relate to contemporary political and social conditions? To what ends have artists employed the tragic form in different locations during the 20th century? Partly motivated by the urgency of our current situation in an age of ecocidal crisis, Modern Tragedy encompasses a variety of drama from throughout the 20th century. James Moran begins this book with John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1904), which shows how environmental awareness might be expressed through tragic drama. Moran also looks at Brecht's reworking of Synge's drama in the 1937 play Señora Carrar's Rifles, and situates Brecht's script in the light of the theatre practitioner's broader ideas about tragedy. Brecht's tragic thinking – informed by Hegel and Marx – is contrasted with the Schopenhauerian approach of Samuel Beckett. The volume goes on to examine theatre makers whose ideas were partly motivated by applying an understanding of the tragic narrative of Synge's Riders to the Sea to postcolonial contexts. Looking at Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and J.P. Clark's The Goat (1961), Modern Tragedy explores how tragedy, a form that is often associated with regressive assumptions about hegemony, might be rethought, and how aspects of the tragic may coincide with the experiences and concerns of authors and audiences of colour.

Author : Shannon McCabe
Publisher : Universal-Publishers
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Aesthetics
ISBN : 9781612334073

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Aesthetic Alternative by Shannon McCabe Pdf

Author : Albert S. Gérard
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 1296 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 1986-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789027274687

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European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa by Albert S. Gérard Pdf

The first major comparative study of African writing in western languages, European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Albert S. Gérard, falls into four wide-ranging sections: an overview of early contacts and colonial developments “Under Western Eyes”; chapters on “Black Consciousness” manifest in the debates over Panafricanism and Negritude; a group of essays on mental decolonization expressed in “Black Power” texts at the time of independence struggles; and finally “Comparative Vistas,” sketching directions that future comparative study might explore. An introductory essay stresses the millennia of writing in Africa, side by side with a richly eloquent and artistic set of vernacular oral traditions; written and oral traditions have become interwoven in adaptations of imported forms and linguistic innovations that challenge traditional “high” literary norms. Gérard uses the mathematical concept of “fuzzy sets” to explain why the focus on “Black Africa” has led him to set aside for future analysis the literatures produced in North Africa, which fall under the influence of Muslim civilization, as well as the diasporic literatures of the New World. Over sixty scholars from twenty-two countries contribute specialized studies of creative writing by leading authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Achebe, Mphahlele, Ngugi, Senghor, Soyinka, and Tutuola. Critical analyses are organized primarily around regions, reflecting different colonial languages imposed through schools and other social institutions. Some authors trace the adaptation of western genres, others identify syncretism with folktales or myths. The volumes are attentive to the heterogeneity of national literatures addressed to polyethnic and multilingual populations, and they note the instrumental politics of language in newly independent states. A closing chapter, “Tasks Ahead,” identifies areas for future scholars to explore.

Author : Erika Fischer-Lichte
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2014-01-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781405175784

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Dionysus Resurrected by Erika Fischer-Lichte Pdf

Dionysus Resurrected analyzes the global resurgence since the late 1960s of Euripides’ The Bacchae. By analyzing and contextualizing these modern day performances, the author reveals striking parallels between transformational events taking place during the era of the play’s revival and events within the play itself. Puts forward a lively discussion of the parallels between transformational eventsduring the era of the play’s revival and events within the play itself The first comparative study to analyse and contextualize performances of The Bacchae that took place between 1968 and 2009 from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia Argues that presentations of the play not only represent liminal states but also transfer the spectators into such states Contends that the play’s reflection on various stages of globalization render the tragedy a contemporary play Establishes the importance of The Bacchae within Euripides’ work as the only extant tragedy in which the god Dionysus himself appears, not just as a character but as the protagonist