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Ghana's Concert Party Theatre. By Catherine M. Cole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; pp. 196 + ill. $52.95 hardcover, $21.95 paperback

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2003

Kevin J. Wetmore
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge
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Extract

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The problem with much postcolonial theatre theory in the West, as Catherine M. Cole points out in her introduction, is that it is “dominated by literary analysis of European-language written texts,” while much of the performance in Africa occurs in the form of “non-textual expressions in so-called indigenous languages” (7). How, then, is the theatre theorist and historian to study the concert party of Ghana, a twentieth-century traveling popular theatre, a comic variety show “that combined an eclectic array of cultural influences,” including, but not limited to, Al Jolson, American movies, Anansesem (Ghanaian “spider stories”), “highlife” music, African-American spirituals, and others in which there is no literary text but there is most definitely a performance text?

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BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2003 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.