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

Extract

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?