Description: This book examines the concept and practice of myth performance in African Diaspora dramas and dances. These six essays chart a new path that enriches and enhances the understanding of African diaspora myth performance in literary and diaspora studies.
Review Quotes:
"According to Kuwabong's introduction, myths 'are neither true nor false narratives, but [in this book] new revelations of the inner relationships of African Diaspora people with their non-African environments.' The three authors offer two chapters each on wide-ranging topics: historical dramas designed to counter Western imperialism; the presence of òrisà worship in dance; the reimagining of the female African body through the African American gaze; the codification of 'soul' in African-derived dance culture; trickster figures in Caribbean and Brazilian drama that engage myth performance through drama and dance; and mythic return journeys to the motherland that complicate rather than romanticize the relationship between the motherland and her distant children. Olsen's conclusion offers valuable contextualization of this 'series of journeys by writers and artists who strive to understand and embody mythical and historical figures from their reconstructed memory of the past in present Africa.' The strengths of the volume include its working across artistic disciplines; continual connection of identity, practice, and praxis in the diaspora to the motherland; and solid theorizing. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above." --Choice Reviews
"The essays relating to dance . . . offer compelling arguments for connecting specific African, here Yoruba, aesthetics with that of African American patterns. . . .On the whole, this collection is an enlightening and well-edited exploration into twenty-first-century diasporic critical praxis, where performance and myth in older and more contemporary subjects are combined into an effective whole." --Research in African Literatures