Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American and Caribbean Drama (review)

Tejumola Olaniyan’s Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance attests to the possibilities for contextualizing complex historical developments and events both concretely and abstractly. For Olaniyan, black theatre artists are representing “difference” in ways that point to a human imagination hard at work against the various regimes—colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, racist—that would quash its struggle for survival. Olaniyan’s project is to delineate a mobile subjectivity that is culturally particular, yet shares in what Ralph Ellison calls an “identity of passions” (6). Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott provide the material with which the book maps black identities as they have been scattered and articulated from the Pacific to the Caribbean and across the Atlantic.

Olaniyan’s thesis is that dramatic representations of black identity have been engaged in an “all-consuming quest for the manufacture of postimperial dramatic subjectivity” (4). The responses to the shared experience of colonization, slavery, and cultural hegemony have come primarily in three discursive formations: the Eurocentric, distinguished by its prejudiced representation of black cultural forms; the Afrocentric, a counterdiscourse preoccupied with subverting the Eurocentric and registering cultural autonomy; and the post-Afrocentric, a liminal, interstitial discourse that aims at once to be both anticolonialist and post-Afrocentric.

Olaniyan follows the tripartite “colonizing structure” proposed by V. Y. Mudimbe: the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective (29). He argues that it is the second structure—the reformation of minds— that creates and sustains notions of black subjectivity. It is in this phase “that history is processed into nature, and contingency into inevitability; where the subjective I is simultaneously real and illusory” (29). Because of this self-propelling and seemingly “natural” formation of black identities, it is necessary for imaginary creations of black subjectivity to be “performative” rather than “expressive.” For Olaniyan, the expressive embraces stasis, holding “the signified as independent of the means of signification—the very erasure of transformational work, and thus of history” (30). The performative, on the other hand, “stresses the historicity of culture,” and is “vulnerable, fragile” because of its acknowledged constructedness (30). But the strength of the performative identity is in its emphasis on process; its very indeterminacy makes it difficult to appropriate. According to Olaniyan, because Afrocentric identity is expressive, it both depends upon the Eurocentric discourse and is easily submerged within the very system of codification it attempts to subvert.

Difference, articulated through a “complex structure” in which things are related as much through their differences as through their similarities, is one of the key elements for post-Afrocentric representation. Cultural identity must be formulated as active and mobile; yet it is also anchored by an agonistic history itself contingent upon temporal, geopolitical conditions. Each of the dramatists discussed in the book “propose[s] the performative identity.” Their propositions, however, are “severely abbreviated, interspersed at many junctures with more or less furtive appropriations of norms characteristic of Afrocentric cultural nationalism” (40).

Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka has called his literary project “race retrieval . . . designed to apprehend and register the presence of a culture” (44), specifically where Western culture has deemed no such creature to exist. Olaniyan’s reading of Death and the King’s Horseman illustrates the play between Yoruba rituals, Nietzsche, and Greek tragedy; he concludes that Soyinka’s ability to hinge various literary forms to the political makes this drama performative. Soyinka’s insistence “that a class approach to African culture is self-defeating and subversive of any claim to unique cultural definitions” has gained him many detractors (57), but Olaniyan points out how Soyinka has clarified and reformulated his position, and that this flexibility in response to criticisms must be “indispensable toward more sensitive appreciations of his project” (66).

For Olaniyan, Amiri Baraka’s drama and its...