Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance.

Cook, William W.

Tejumola Olaniyan. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 196 pp. $42.000 cloth/$16.95 paper.

Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 45 Tejumola Olaniyan's study of African, African-American, and Caribbean drama, offers the student of these dramatic traditions both an historical and a theoretical analysis so impressive that it will certainly become a touchstone for future students of culture. Olaniyan's work will serve a scholarly community interested not only in drama but also in broader cultural issues. This is the work of a generous scholar, one who reads with an impressive attention to detail and a broad range of relevant scholarship. Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, however, Olaniyan does not simply offer a journalistic summary of the ideas of others. He is an original thinker who builds on, synthesizes, and takes issue with the broad range of scholars dealt with in his study, many of whose ideas and individual readings enjoy near-canonical standing in theater history and in the broader field of cultural studies. This study deservedly lays claim to excellence for its impressive scholarship and its practical suggestions aimed at a revision of our usual uncomplicated theorizing about cultural and identity construction.

Central to Olaniyan's contribution to theater history is his skillful recovery of minstrel and Carnival as originating sites for an African-American and a Caribbean drama. In opposition to readings of these dramatic traditions as primitive, exotic, and pre-theatrical constructions, he argues convincingly that ignoring or marginalizing these performance traditions deprives us of a full understanding of Black performance in Africa and in the diaspora. Those bent on essentializing readings of Black performance cannot escape the irony of the non-black origins of both minstrelsy and Carnival. Instead of centering his study on such essentialist readings, Olaniyan decodes (1) the Eurocentric or colonialist discourse which argues the universality and superiority of Western European drama, which denies true dramatic traditions to Africa, and which insists on African dramatic analogies to European forms as the only acceptable evidence of drama in Africa, and (2) Afrocentric discursive practices which resist the hegemonic practices of Eurocentric drama by insisting on the necessity of "a quest for different representations," or change in the rules of the game, but which fail, nonetheless, to satisfy Olaniyan's requirements for a truly enabling dramatic discourse. Insisting on an essential "African" identity, this discourse, as promoted by "Harlem Renaissance" and "Black Arts Movement" theorists and practitioners, reifies orality, feeling, festivals, and ritual, while denigrating the well-made play. Central to the problems which Olaniyan presents through a forceful marshaling of historical and theoretical evidence is the reinscription, within this Afrocentric discourse, of the very binary structure so unacceptable in Eurocentric or Colonialist discourse. This notwithstanding, Olaniyan cites Jonathan Dollimore's insistence that the "inversion" or "overturning," the subversion, of hierarchies is "a necessary stage in a process of resistance."

Olaniyan then identifies a third stage in this process: post-Afrocentric discourse. Such a discourse, while still seeking differences, also questions the very way in which difference is represented. It grounds itself in historical specificity by examining both "foreign" and "indigenous" sources and influences. It straddles both the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric discourses by challenging, extending, and re-visioning these discourses. It recognizes the necessity for "endless critical questioning." It insists on process rather than the static grounding implicit in the binary oppositions of the other discourses. It is resistant to the essentializing of the culture so central to Eurocentric and Afrocentric discourses, while occupying a great deal of the same ground as the Afrocentric: "Social relations have no essence, transhistorical or axiomatic, but are always pragmatic, arbitrary, contextual--in short, historical. If society has an `essence,' then it is its permanent openness ...."

Olaniyan's purpose in tracing the development of this third discursive system is to propose through it the possibility and desirability of other models for conceiving cultural difference. For example, essentialism, so implicit in his first two models, ossifies culture, denies its historical specificity and its pluralism at any given historical moment. The three discursive complexes which Olaniyan identifies (Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and post-Afrocentric) all tend toward expressive and performative propositions of culture and identity, Olaniyan argues. The expressive tends toward what he calls culturalism, which is marked by self/other binaries, by fixed essence, and by historically secured constructions of cultural history. The performative, while tending toward the expressive, recognizes it as an expedient, as neither divine nor historically situated. This proposition recognizes the presence of choice on the part of the artist to emphasize specific options of a complex cultural heritage at specific points in history at the expense of others. There is no essence here; parts of the performative are never immutable. In this respect, the performative differs from the expressive and its culturalism, foregrounding what Olaniyan calls articulation. The post-Afrocentric, in its focus on the performative and on articulation, recognizes culture as a construction and not as a seamless totality. It is a process "marked by endless negotiations." Thus, a performative view of cultural identity is marked by change, by appropriations, by deconstructions, by an awareness of multiplicity; it is concerned with negotiations necessitated by specific historical moments rather than characterized by a fixed and unchanging ideological positionality.

This brief summary of Olaniyan's theoretical ground, which he carefully articulates in his opening chapters, does not do justice to the range and richness of his argument. It only offers a sense of the excitement which I experienced upon reading Olaniyan's complex explication of his theorizing of dramatic practice in Africa and the Diaspora, which prepares the reader well for his application of Olaniyan's theoretical musings on identity construction and dramatic practice at the three sites on which he focuses attention. If the first chapters of his study may be defined as telescopic (they view drama within a broad range of cultural practices and theories), the chapters which follow attempt a microscopic examination of specific dramatists and dramas.

Olaniyan first turns to the dramatist on whose work he is most convincing and most thorough, Wole Soyinka. He uses Osofisan and Jeyifo to brilliant effect in order to complicate our reading of Death and the lUng-'s Horseman. His analysis demands our rethinking of Soyinka's theatrical project, of the extent to which the expressive, the essentialist, and the ahistorical, all resistance notwithstanding, can be re-read into Soyinka's text. Olaniyan proves Death and the King's Horseman to be anything but singular in its construction, owing its life not only to resistant and Afrocentric but also to Eurocentric discourses. Moreover, as Marxist critics Osofisan and Biodun argue, Soyinka's work fails to qualify as post-Afrocentric, informed as it is by his failure to address issues of class, by his too persistent focus on myth, by his ahistorical constructions, and by his essentialist approach to culture. Soyinka, in Olaniyan's reading, does not create a performative cultural identity; rather, his is an expressive construct.

Osofisan's critique of Soyinka asserts that unmediated ritual is not revolutionary. Death and the Kings Horseman and Madmen and Specialists he reads as "idealist illusion," as anti-progressive fatalism, and as "reconciliation with the status quo." Olaniyan's summary of Osofisan's critique calls to witness the potential of dialectically mediated ritual, present in The Road and The Strong Breed, to serve the revolutionary purpose which Death and the King's Horseman and Madmen and Specialists fail to achieve. Jeyifo, who shares with Osofisan serious misgivings about the revolutionary potential of Soyinka's drama, has assumed a far less negative stance, one focused on Soyinka's revitalization of central ideas of African thought for a contemporary society and the convergence of his mythical constructs with history. Still, concludes Olaniyan, Soyinka's "vast canvas of performative articulation" reveals its expressive content in its indifference to issues of cultural stratification, gender and class, and intracultural difference.

Olaniyan's discussion of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones, Derek Walcott, and ntozake shange, while not so richly textured as his Soyinka chapter, does place these artists securely within the schema that he proposes. In each of the four "test cases" which Olaniyan presents, he reveals a strength almost equal to his theoretical powers: He is such a brilliant close reader of texts that one wishes for a richer and more detailed demonstration of this skill. Dutchman and Baptism as a kind of Declaration of Cultural Independence from Baraka's former cultural stances is surely needed in the Baraka/Jones section, as is a closer study of The System of Dante's Hell. Too little attention is paid to Baraka/Jones's attempts at a hybrid language, the influence of which shange cites. Such an examination would provide a connective thematics to both shange and Walcott and would heighten the cultural work being done in Olaniyan's excellent treatment of The Motion of History and his even more pointed explication of the way in which language functions in Walcott's work--his "coherent deformations," his "mulatto" style.

On Walcott, Olaniyan quotes Alan Weiss's definition of coherent deformation as "the process whereby the form, the facticity of the world is shattered by praxis, with the result that a new meaning ensues. The `coherency' maintains the equivalence between signs; the `deformation' achieves the differences between signs." Conscious and controlled eclecticism, Olaniyan argues, privilege an enabling Caribbean cultural identity. He finds in Walcott's hybridity an unacknowledged "trust in the canon, in his mulatto aesthetics not a revolutionary challenge to received borders, but rather, a masked and crippling awe for such limitations," a "self-immolation at the altar of the western tradition." At the core of Walcott's work as in Soyinka's and Baraka/Jones's, Olaniyan finds not a performative but an expressive proposition and practice. Walcott's concern with fixed notions of textual hegemony, of language in its "highest" forms as the empire of desire justifies such categorization.

In his last chapter Olaniyan turns to ntozake shange. His summation of the dramatists already discussed points to the theoretical uses he wishes to make of her work:

Soyinka remains suspicious of considerations of class (and by

implication, other crucial kinds of) differences in the formulation

of African cultural identity. Walcott would have Caribbean

history as culture rather than as politics, as if the realm of

the social admits of such a choice or distinction. And the force

and energy of Baraka's vision and creative practice have always

depended on a certain radical absolutism ... which is impatient

with or distrustful of compromises, minute details, or fine

intermeshings: bohemian-bourgeoisie. ... In his Marxist

phase, Baraka is at his most sensitive to the myriad

determinations, of the social, but in large part only as they are

subsumable to the great proletariat-bourgeoisie

battle.

Can shange's work be said to speak to the problems in Soyinka, Walcott, and Baraka summarized in the above review of the three chapters devoted to these writers? Here I had hoped for a reading more directly tied to issues raised in the earlier discussions. Olaniyan, because he does not focus on possible traces of hybridity in the language of those Baraka works to which shange attributes her own experiments with language, fails to highlight the specialness of shange's "mulatto" language and especially the language she so skillfully employs in for colored girls ...: the language of movement. Dance is equal in this work to the spoken word--and, in its freedom from verbal lexicons, free to cross multiple discourses. Her work is a "choreopoem," a title that one may argue signals dance as more central than verbal discourses (choreo, precedes poem). In her choice of colors rather than names, she attempts to avoid the essentializing trap of traditional protest plays. Her ladies are as multiple as the colors of the rainbow and in that multiplicity they escape simple binaries, moving instead toward a much richer and more complex cultural identity shange is acutely aware of the centrality of class and gender in cultural formations, and she directly deals with these issues suppressed/repressed in the male-authored works. The myriad song references are more than the simple "saturation" referred to in Stephen Henderson's study; they situate the work in a specific historical period and clearly point to class and gender cultural particulars.

But these are minor cavils given the theoretical power and the enabling opening which Olaniyan provides. It is a testament to his power and leads the reader to want to see more of Olaniyan's stunning close reading in the sections on Baraka and shange, guided by his sure theoretical grounding.