Hi Everyone,
I am posting to the blog main points of the reading and our activities for Thursday. I hope we have a fun class. You will get your midterms back after break (reading 32 eight page midterms takes time!). You may also check in with me during office hours about grade. Have a nice Spring break!
045:030: Introduction to African American Culture Discussion
(Whaley)
Catherine M. Cole
“When is African Theater “Black?”
Vocabulary:
• Proscenium-style staging refers to the area between the orchestra and the stage curtain
• Bicameral separation refers to a two part separation between performers and audience
• Spectator refers to viewer or audience of the visual
• Afro-pop is African and Western popular music styles
• Ghanaian concert party is a traveling theater minstrel troupe
• Black cultural traffic refers to the transnational circulation of Black culture
• Ghana Pan African Historical Theater commemorates the devastation of the African slave trade on Africa at Panafest
I. Intent of the Essay:
To examine if Africans identify with a transnational notion of Blackness or is it entirely a localized perception of identity.
II. Major Points of Essay:
• African theater is influenced by the West insofar as it is scripted dramas in English or European languages
• Apartheid in South African affected its theater, especially the divisions among coloured, Black, and White people
• Class continues to affect social relations in South African even in a post apartheid era
• African theater rarely identifies with a unified “Blackness,” rather, it is articulated in terms of ethnicity, gender, seniority and concerns related to national boundaries
• Africans have been fascinated with Black American culture since the 1930s and 1940s and this fascination finds its way into African cultural productions
• Sarafina the only well-known, African modern theater production in America
• Humor is irrational and therefore may be difficult to theorize as a motive for racialization
III. Forms of theater:
• Poetic literary masterpieces written in English (Soyinka)
• Improvised non-scripted shows in indigenous languages
• Traveling melodramas
• Community based skits promoting literacy
• Internationally successful South African productions
• They use fluid spatial dynamics
Discussion Questions:
1. What are the literal and figurative dynamics of space in African theater?
2. How is African theater European, indigenous, and African American?
3. Who is the audience for African theater?
4. How do we make since of the Ghanaian concert party’s minstrelsy aesthetic, that is, its incorporation of American and British Blackface into its theater productions?
5. How is “tranting” a form of “Black cultural traffic?”
6. What meaning does Blackface have in Ghana according Bampoe, that is, what are the multifarious ways it is used?
7. How do other Africans feel about it blackface?
8. Can blackface be both indigenous to African forms and offensive in American forms at the same time, or does its possible African roots in indigenous practices erase its offensiveness in the American context?
9. Given that Africans were transfixed, in some ways, by American blackface imagery, should we take at face value their intents? Can Africans engage in blackface as an excusable social drama because of their “Africaness?”
10. View the clips from a Sarah Silverman episode that airs on comedy central. What do the episodes suggest about the use of blackface and racism? Does the episode help create a dialogue about race, or does it circuitously evade the seriousness of blackface through its caricature? Is this interventionist art, parody for parody sake, post-modern pop art, or problematic? All?
• http://sarahsilverman.comedycentral.com/index.jhtml?c=vc&videoId=118606
• http://sarahsilverman.comedycentral.com/index.jhtml?c=vc&videoId=118604
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz2fhmRzCOA
11. The last Silverman clip suggests that Chapelle caricatured African Americans, and even pokes fun at his disintegration into regret and depression. What do you think she is trying to convey here? Is the aforementioned clip different from the Wayans Brothers caricatures in White Chicks? What are the historical, cultural, and social issues at stake in what all of the comedians are doing? Our article notes that Freud believes humor is a difficult form to weigh for social/political meaning because its motivations are not rationale. Do you agree?
From Ethnic Notions: The emergence of minstrelsy:
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