Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction Performance and Ìfọgbợntáayéṣe: Genre, Knowledge, and Politics

   • Glenn Odom

   Pages 1-26

3. A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Individual Authority, Community Creation, and the Embodiment of Àṣẹ

   • Glenn Odom

   Pages 27-52

4. What Matter Who Dances?: Self-fashioning, (non)Subjects, and the Nation

   • Glenn Odom

   Pages 53-81

5. No Victor, No Vanquished, No Past: Ola Rotimi, Yakubu Gowon, Sani Abacha, and ‘The End of Nigerian History’

   • Glenn Odom

   Pages 82-103

6. Values Beyond Ethics: From Stella Dia Oyedepo to Tess Onwueme

   • Glenn Odom

   Pages 104-133

7. Conclusions: Civil Governance and the Politics of Yorùbá Theatre

   • Glenn Odom

   Pages 134-154

8. Back Matter

   Pages 155-162

   PDF

This book explains the connections between traditional performance (e.g. masked dances, prophecy, praise recitations), contemporary theatre (Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Tess Onwueme, Femi Osofisan, and Stella Oyedepo) , and the political sphere in the context of the Yorùbá people in Nigeria.

• Yorùbá performance
• African performance
• International performance
• critique
• dance
• history
• individual
• Maske
• nation
• performance
• politics
• resistance
• subject
• theatre
• tradition

“Glenn Odom’s Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics creatively links the politics of ritual and theatrical performances to the rhetoric and policies of some of Nigeria’s leading nationalist politicians and civilian and military leaders from the 1950s to the early 1990s. … A major strength of Odom’s work is the rich array of ethnographic and oral sources that he uses to illuminate a Yoruba vocabulary in particular.” (John Thabiti Willis, TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 63 (1), 2019)

• University of Roehampton, UK

  Glenn Odom

Glenn Odom is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, UK. His previous publications include articles in journals such as Comparative Drama, Comparative Literature, TDR (The Drama Review) and Studies in English Literature.

Policies and ethics