A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Non-Western Performance Aesthetics and the Development of the Nigerian Stage

Spring 2009 131 A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Non-Western Performance Aesthetics and the Development of the Nigerian Stage Glenn Odom Art historians have done extensive work explaining Yorùbá systems of aesthetics, particularly with regard to the philosophy and practice of representation. Scholarship on Yorùbá aesthetics has produced a series of questions surrounding the relationship of audience to representation, the relationship of representation to authority, and the fluidity, innate power, and interpretation of representation. This work, particularly the discussion of àse or the authority of art, has not become a regular part of discussions ofAfrican theatrical theory and practice: in point of fact, despite the work of Wole Soyinka, Margaret Drewal,AndrewApter, Karin Barber, and others, a vast array of contemporary criticism onAfrican theatre still uses Bertolt Brecht andAntoninArtaud for theoretical grounding. Given thatAfrican writers are aware of Brecht and Artaud, and that the formal changes in theatre have a surface similarity to Brechtian alienation andArtaud’s theatre of cruelty, an understanding of contemporaryYorùbá aesthetics can be found in the disjunctions and intersections between traditionalYorùbá aesthetics and avant-gardeWestern theory.With recourse to Artaud’s discussion of Western modes of representation as a point of contrast, this article explains the explicitly political ramifications of alterations of traditional Yorùbá aesthetics. In the Yorùbá system, where representation is always an act of authority but also conceived as fluid, the avenues of resistance are less clear than in the Western system, where the authority of representation, generally conceived as stable, is present as an aftereffect in the audience. If one accepts the arguments of modernist Western theatrical practitioners such as Brecht, Artaud, Augusto Boal, and Jerzy Grotowski, the crisis point in Western aesthetics and its relationship to politics came early in the development of Western theatre. When Parmenides postulates that all being is unified, he effectively erases the possibility of representation. If that-which-is is and that-which-is is unified and unchanging, then there can be no divisions in the univocality that would allow man to intervene and create representations. Aristotle opens the possibility of an analogical world in which every being is related to that-which-is, but not part of the same being. The scholastics, humanists, and neoplatonists take this as a point of entry into their understanding of both metaphysics and representation, and thus, Glenn Odom received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine, in 2007. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Grinnell College and will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Rowan University in the Fall 2009. 132 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism as Derrida says, the “theater is born in its own disappearance, and the offspring of this movement has a name: man.”1 In other words, this aspect of Western metaphysics is founded upon the idea of a rupture between being and form that theatrical representation is always trying to bridge. When the essence of being is separated from forms, the assumption of an ordered universe requires that some force—man—step in and recognize these forms for what they are, connect them one to another, and place them back in the order to which they belong. As long as Western systems of representation postulate a difference between signifier and signified—as long as the concept of representation is intimately connected with metaphor, analogy, and allegory—Artaud laments that theatre will never reach its potential for “total revolution.”2 Man, in his interpretive capacity, will always mediate between representation and “truth.” The political impetus of modern avantgarde theatre manifests in a desire to change this relationship and either remove the separation between representation and truth or reveal the illusion of representation so as to reposition man. The fundamental conditions of Yorùbá representation are different but not diametrically opposed. There is no initial postulation of a rupture between signifier and signified, and the process of “reading” representation relies upon the authority of the representation and the authority invoked by the reader. The assimilative Yorùbá aesthetics places itself squarely inside the ìwà (inherent unchanging quality) of the world and authorizes the absolute nature of its representations through the evocation...