Spiders of the Market: Ghanaian Trickster Performance in a Web of Neoliberalism by David Afriyie Donkor (review)

Ghanaian expressive culture has received enormous attention in the last few decades, with studies on topics ranging from "traditional" drumming and dancing to popular music such as highlife and its contemporary development hip-life, as well as concert party, state dance ensembles, poetry, film, narrative, folklore, and, of course, theatre. David Afriyie Donkor's book Spiders of the Market: Ghanaian Trickster Performance in a Web of Neoliberalism comes on the heels of a similar examination of Ghanaian theatre, Jesse Shipley's Trickster Theatre, also published by Indiana University Press (2015). Both analyze ananse (spider) trickster performance within the context of neoliberal political economy. While there is some inevitable overlap, namely in shared historical narratives and in their analysis of a national concert party series, each author presents complimentary case studies, taking distinct political and theoretical stances that produce valuable contributions in their own right.

While Shipley's work takes a more historically-sweeping diachronic approach, Donkor focuses more acutely on the Rawlings government (1979–2000), showing how it harnessed staged cultural performance, rooted in ananse storytelling, to legitimize its power and policies. Against the backdrop of democratization and neoliberalism, the genres of gyimi (stand-up comedy), concert party (variety show), and kodzi (spider-trickster storytelling) are investigated to illustrate the ways in which performers embody the trickster's cunning to subvert government and corporate agendas, maintaining creative integrity in the face of attempts to co-opt their artistry. Donkor employs a combination of performance and post-colonial theories to highlight the dual nature of trickster performativity, as it often simultaneously constructs and deconstructs the social order. This double-ness also appears in the author's insightful analysis regarding the dialectic between the subjunctive ("acted self") and indicative ("true self") performance modes.

Chapter One offers a conventional political history of Ghana, starting in the 1940s and moving through the Nkrumah and post-Nkrumah periods, to set up the book's subsequent focus on the Rawlings era. Readers already familiar with this history may find it unnecessary to revisit this rehearsal. Moreover, this discussion could have benefitted from more analysis of the cultural activity and policies during these periods, particularly Nkrumah's own co-opting of expressive forms (i.e., highlife, theatre, "drumming and dancing") to legitimize his power; such a discussion would have provided a firm comparative reference point for the remainder of the text.

Offering further historical and cultural foundation, Chapter Two details the practices of anansesem storytelling. Here, Donkor emphasizes and elucidates the "ontological double-ness" of the trickster spider, using colonial and post-colonial accounts to explore how ananse transgresses and avoids human/divine, true/false, actual/imagined, and man/animal dichotomies. Escaping definition and capture, this ambiguity, the author argues, gives the trickster its power as a "counterhegemonic" critique of political structures, even as it may often create such cultural webs of authority. Ultimately, Donkor convincingly argues that "ananse is more of an ethos than an individual" (83).

Taken together, the first two chapters provide historical and cultural context for the subsequent case studies outlined in the following three chapters. Chapter Three particularly analyzes Rawlings' co-opting of gyimi (comic foolery), examining the way that he conscripted the well-known performer/comedian Bishop-Bob Okalla into endorsing his campaign. Donkor illustrates the ways in which Okalla used clever ananse-style indirection, ambivalence, and innuendo to avoid partisan politics while maintaining his own sense of artistic integrity, his counterhegemonic voice, and his reputation and fan-base. Chapter Four examines how the Rawlings regime and the Unilever corporation reconfigured the concert party tradition at the National Theatre in the 1990s to bolster support for their compounding neoliberal agendas. This discussion evinces that concert party was simplified, sanitized, and de-politicized through a "progressive" ideology to create a wider consumer appeal, as performers employed a repertoire of trickster tactics to counter these...