Voyages in Postcolonial African Theatre Practice goes beyond the predictable academic discursive trips on postcolonial drama and theatre practice. In 14 unique but interrelated essays, this volume dissects the critical issues that envelop the practice of theatre in postcolonial Africa and the African Diaspora, and how practitioners engage with the trends which arise. The volume departs from the conventional theoretical constructs of humanistic studies and focuses on concrete realities that interface and interfere with the professional practice of African theatre, a creative industry confined by the historical and dialectical motifs of the colonial experience. Topics such as secondary adaptations, theatre training and pedagogy, censorship and performance politics, applied theatre, cultural policy and tourism, scenography, festivals and oral tradition, dance internationalisation, popular music, text and the African film reflect the broad coverage and diversity of this volume on African postcolonial theatre practices, from text to performance, planning to production.

The Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance brings together the very latest international research on the performing arts across the continent and the diaspora into one expansive and wide-ranging collection. The book offers readers a compelling journey through the different ideas, people and practices that have shaped African theatre and performance, from pre-colonial and colonial times, right through to the 20th and early 21st centuries. Resolutely Pan-African and inter- national in its coverage, the book draws on the expertise of a wide range of Africanist scholars, and also showcases the voices of performers and theatre practitioners working on the cutting-edge of African theatre and performance practice. Contributors aim to answer some of the big questions about the content (nature, form) and context (processes, practice) of theatre, whilst also painting a pluralistic and complex picture of the diversity of cultural, political and artistic exigencies across the continent. Covering a broad range of themes including postcolonialism, transnationalism, interculturalism, Afropolitanism, development and the diaspora, the handbook concludes by projecting possible future directions for African theatre and performance as we continue to advance into the 21st century and beyond. This ground-breaking new handbook will be essential reading for students and researchers studying theatre and performance practices across Africa and the diaspora. Kene Igweonu is Professor of Creative Education at University of the Arts London, where he is also Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of London College of Communication. An interdisciplinary researcher, Professor Igweonu has extensive experience of senior academic leadership in immersive and interactive practices and performance practice. His practice research and publication interests are in storytelling, theatre, and performance in Africa and its Diaspora, as well as the Feldenkrais Method in health, wellbeing, and performance training. A champion for arts and creative industries, Professor Igweonu is Chair of DramaHE, Council Member for Creative UK, and until August 2023, President of the African Theatre Association.

This collection of 11 plays, from North America, the U.K., and South Africa—many published here for the first time—delves into the vibrant, cosmopolitan theatre of the South Asian diaspora. These original and provocative works explore the experience of diaspora by drawing on cultural references as diverse as classical Indian texts, adaptations of Shakespeare and Homer, current events, and world music, film, and dance. Neilesh Bose provides historical background on South Asian migration and performance traditions in each region, along with critical introductions and biographical background on each playwright. Includes works by Anuvab Pal, Aasif Mandvi, Shishir Kurup, Rahul Varma, Rana Bose, Rukhsana Ahmad, Jatinder Verma, Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smith, Ronnie Govender, Kessie Govender, and Kriben Pillay.

The rock art sites of the Tadrart Acacus in southwestern Libya were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, largely owing to the activities started in 1955 by Fabrizio Mori, founder of the Libyan-Italian Mission in the Tadrart Acacus and Messak. Since the beginning, the Department of Antiquities of Tripoli and Sebha, Libya, and Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, have worked in the region nearly without interruption until 2011. This book presents the archive of the rock art sites, identified and recorded by the Italian Mission and by independent scholars, as described and critically assessed by the authors within the framework of the ASArt-DATA project (the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme). The contributions introducing the catalogue contextualize the environmental, archaeological, and cultural aspects of the engravings and paintings. They include chapters addressing the historical, cultural, and diplomatic issues involved in the long-term bilateral scientific cooperation.

A study of post-colonial drama and theatre. It examines how dramatists from various societies have attempted to fuse the performance idioms of their traditions with the Western dramatic form, demonstrating how the dynamics of syncretic theatrical texts function in performance.

This title was first published in 2000. This study looks at the contestation of forestry in West Africa, taking into account historical considerations, cultural negotiations and environmental issues.

In Beyond Constraint, Shona N. Jackson offers a new approach to labour and its analysis by demonstrating the fundamental relation between black and Indigenous People’s sovereign, free, and coerced labour in the Americas. Through the writings of Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, Jackson confronts the elision of Indigenous People’s labour in the black radical tradition. She argues that this elision is an effect of the structural relation of antiblackness to anti-indigeneity through which native and black bodies are arranged on either side of a split between unproductive labour and productive work necessary for capital accumulation and for how we read capital in political economic critique. This division between labour and work forces the radical tradition to sustain the break between black and Indigenous peoples as part of its critical strategies of liberation. To address this impasse, Jackson reads the tradition against the grain for openings to indigeneity and a method for recovering lost labours.

A multimedia eBook showcasing a collection of pieces created by artists working with the New Community-Informed Approaches to Humanitarian Protection and Restraint project based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The different media are interspersed with non-academic, descriptive text written by the project’s Principal Investigator, Jeremy Allouche. Presented in the book are photography, theatre, dance, music, painting, writing, and slam poetry, in combination with some of the research findings. Collectively, they provide an alternative perspective on the experience of protection issues from the point of view of the arts, the social sciences, and the humanities.