Tejumola Olaniyan.

Tejumola Olaniyan. fresh York: Oxford UP, 1995. 196 pp $42000 cloth/$1695 paper.

Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, 45 Tejumola Olaniyan's subject of attention of African, African-American, and Caribbean drama, tenders the student of these dramatic traditions one as well as the other an historical and a theoretical analysis in the way that impressive that it will certainly become a touchstone for coming time students of culture. Olaniyan's work will subserve a scholarly community interested not solitary in drama but also in broader cultural issues. This is the work of a generous scholar, the same 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 show a journalistic summary of the ideas of others. He is an original thinker who builds forward synthesizes, and takes issue with the broad range of scholars dealt with in his subject of attention many of whose ideas and individual readings have intercourse with near-canonical standing in theater history and in the broader field of cultural studies. This studious mood deservedly lays claim to good quality 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 regaining 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 satiated understanding of Black performance in Africa and in the diaspora. Those bent forward essentializing readings of Black performance cannot escape the irony of the non-black origins of the couple minstrelsy and Carnival. Instead of centering his studious mood on such essentialist readings, Olaniyan decode (1) the Eurocentric or colonialist discourse which argues the universality and superiority of Western European drama, which denies constant dramatic traditions to Africa, and which insists in succession African dramatic analogies to European forms as the and nothing else acceptable evidence of drama in Africa, and (2) Afrocentric discursive practices which resist the hegemonic practices of Eurocentric drama on insisting on the necessity of "a suit for different representations," or change in the masterys of the game, but which fail, nonetheless, to satisfy Olaniyan's requirements for a candidly enabling dramatic discourse. Insisting forward an essential "African" identity, this discourse, as promot at "Harlem Renaissance" and "Black Arts Movement" theorists and practitioners, reifies orality, feeling, festivals, and ritual, while denigrating the well-made play. Central to the question s which Olaniyan presents through a forceful marshaling of historical and theoretical evidence is the reinscription, within this Afrocentric discourse, of the exceedingly 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 proces of resistance."

Olaniyan then identifies a third stage in this process: post-Afrocentric discourse. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a discourse, while still seeking differences, also questions the remarkably way in which difference is give an account ofed It grounds itself in historical specificity through examining both "foreign" and "indigenous" sources and influences. It straddles the one and the other the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric discourses from challenging, extending, and re-visioning these discourses. It recognizes the necessity for "endles critical questioning." It insists forward process rather than the static grounding implicit in the binary oppositions of the other discourses. It is resistant to the essentializing of the improvement so central to Eurocentric and Afrocentric discourses, while occupying a great deal of the same sod as the Afrocentric: "Social relations have no nature transhistorical or axiomatic, but are always pragmatic, arbitrary, contextual--in short, historical. If society has an `essence' then it is its permanent opennes "

Olaniyan's intent in tracing the development of this third discursive scheme is to propose through it the possibility and desirability of other patterns for conceiving cultural difference. For example, essentialism, in the same manner implicit in his first sum of two units models, ossifies culture, denies its historical specificity and its pluralism at any given historical trice The three discursive complexes which Olaniyan identifies (Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and post-Afrocentric) all wait on toward expressive and performative propositions of improvement and identity, Olaniyan argues. The expressive note carefullys toward what he calls culturalism, which is marked by the agency of self/other binaries, by fixed substance 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 air of choice on the part of the artist to emphasize specific options of a web cultural heritage at specific points in history at the cost of others. There is no nature here; parts of the performative are not ever immutable. In this respect, the performative differs from the expressive and its culturalism, foregrounding what Olaniyan calls articulation. The post-Afrocentric, in its focus forward the performative and on articulation, recognizes improvement as a construction and not as a seamless totality. It is a proces "marked from endless negotiations." Thus, a performative view of cultural identity is marked through change, by appropriations, by deconstructions, from an awareness of multiplicity; it is be of importance toed with negotiations necessitated by specific historical impulsive powers rather than characterized by a fixed and unchanging ideological positionality.