Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance by Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Christopher Olsen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance by Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Christopher Olsen Gabriel J. Jiménez Fuentes Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong, and Christopher Olsen. 2014. Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. 166pp. ISBN: 978-0-8108-9279-8. Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance, written by Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong and Christopher Olsen, is a well-researched and brilliantly written collection of essays that explores and brings into discussion the connectedness of Africans and African Diaspora people from North to South America and Caribbean localities. The writers examine the concepts and practices of myths, drama, dance, legends and rituals, and other cultural expressions of Africans in the Diaspora and how these performances—and the collective memory of them—have been mythicized to re/create and/or connect narratives that evoke and invoke the recuperation and restoration of African culture and history, thought to be lost within the Eurocentric dominated historiography of the Americas and the Caribbean. The book comprises six chapters, with an introduction and a [End Page 232] conclusion. The body of the book serves to present six outstanding and well-informed essays, two essays per writer, each one with a robust and well-rounded use of literary, cultural and philosophical theories as well as descriptions and examinations of art forms and religious manifestations. Thus, these essays are not only works of literary analysis of African American (from North and South America) and African Caribbean dramas but are also works of descriptive analysis of African Diaspora performances such as dance, music and religious rituals. The authors also seek to present to the readers a critical analysis of the many African-derived mythological elements that have influenced and/or have helped to build and/or clear the bridges that culturally and historically connect Africans in the Diaspora with Africans on the continent. This book is a tribute of the ingenuity of the African descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean; their creativity, exploration and connectivity to their historical roots, which prompted the rejection and challenged the European mentality that diminished any image of Africa. It is then a celebration, for as Dannabang Kuwabong states in the introduction, “Ritual Journeys, Dancing Histories, Enacting Bodies, and Spirits,” where he emphasizes that the motivation of the book “is to join in this discursive praxis, not to regurgitate representational ideas of Atlantic African Diaspora, but to celebrate” the re/creation, articulation and appropriateness of African history and culture by African descendant persons “through [the] dramatic (re)mythicization of historical Africans” (2014:2). For them, the performances of drama and dance developed by Africans in the Diaspora have maintained African narratives which, as Kuwabong argues, have formed “praxes that affirm their Afrisporic (a word coined by Kuwabong from both African and Diasporic words to connote and denote a neuter gender) worldview” (2014:1). Myth Performance in the African Diaspora: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance emerges as an effort to explore the “elements of epic and myth” utilized by “African Diaspora peoples’ [in their] search for cultural [and historical] liberation” (Kuwabong 2014:3). The definition of myth utilized by the writers gives an insight of the type of analysis conveyed by the writers; as Kuwabong states, myth for them is the “performative transformations” of collective “practical wisdom of Africans in the African continent and in the Diaspora” (2014:4). Thus, African-derived elements such as African figures (heroes and victims), dance movements, literary manifestations, sacred and secular rituals, deities and religious artifacts, and their transformative forms, are explored by the writers to showcase the mythicization of these by African American (North America and Latin America) and African Caribbean in order to create a cultural freedom and to position, once again, Africa in their history maps. The book opens with Dannabang Kuwabong’s “Re-visionary History [End Page 233] as Myth Performance: A Postcolonial Re-reading of Maud Cuney-Hare’s Antar of Araby, Willis Richarson’s The Black Horseman, and Aimé Césaire’s And the Dogs Were Silent.” Drawing from the work of African American and African Caribbean playwrights, Kuwabong places his discussion at the center...