African Theatre 19 - Opera & Music Theatre

This book explores the diversity of opera and music theatre in African and African diasporic contexts, raising questions about their practices, legacies, and relations to social, political, and economic realities. It also addresses aesthetic transformation processes, genre boundaries, and the role of space and place.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 10 November 2020
Publisher: James Currey

Music is frequently recognized as a fundamental artistic medium in African theater and performance traditions. However, there has been relatively little focus on music theater on the continent, particularly opera, with a few notable exceptions, such as the Concert Party or the Yoruba folk opera of the 1960s, and the emerging research on opera culture in South Africa. This volume of African Theatre explores the diversity across the continent from various perspectives, including genre, media, and historiography. Above all, it raises critical questions and fosters debate: What does opera mean in African and African diasporic contexts? What are its practices and legacies, including colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial; what is its relationship to the intersectionalities of race and class? How do opera and music theater reflect, change, or obscure social, political, and economic realities? How are they connected to educational and cultural institutions, and non-profit organizations? And why is opera paradoxically perceived as both grand and elitist, folk and quotidian, Eurocentric and indigenous? Contributors also address aesthetic transformation processes, the permeability of genre boundaries, and the role of space and place, with examples ranging from Egypt to South Africa, from Uganda to West Africa, and the USA. The playscript in this volume is We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo.

Guest Editors:

Christine Matzke, Lena van der Hoven, Christopher Odhiambo & Hilde Roos

Series Editors:

Yvette Hutchison, Reader, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick; Chukwuma Okoye, Reader in African Theatre & Performance, University of Ibadan; Jane.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 147 x 222 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781847012579