The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theater [Hardcover]

Karin Barber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

From the 1940s to the 1980s, Yoruba popular theatre was a lively and important genre. Today, travelling theatre companies have virtually disappeared due to the influence of radio, television, and other forms of mass communication in Nigeria. In "The Generation of Plays", Karin Barber recounts her experience while she was on tour with the Oyin Adejobi Company. Drawing on archival sources as well as extensive interviews and transcriptions of plays, Barber uncovers the pulse points of generation, production, and improvisation that merge when a Yoruba popular drama is successfully brought to the stage. Barber reveals the personalities of the principal actors, how they create plays - from the germ of an idea through the logistics of rehearsal and staging - how a play is made meaningful to its audience, how a play changes and develops after several productions or according to the sensibilities of its viewers. The expanding role of popular drama as a television form is also considered. This rich and detailed narrative illuminates notions of gender, language, politics, and self as they are expressed in popular cultural forms. It affords a unique view of the social and cultural perspectives of the actors and audiences involved in a flourishing and vital enterprise.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Karin Barber has given us a vivid picture of one of the most vital forms of modern African popular art. It is beautifully written and informed by a deep affection for the subject ... a major contribution to the cultural history of Nigeria." --J. D. Y. Peel " ... a fine-grained history (and ethnography) of a dramatic troupe providing an everyday, empirical sense of what is involved in the production of a popular cultural form... a magisterial contribution to African popular culture more widely." --Brian Larkin

About the Author

Karin Barber is Senior Lecturer at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. She is author of Yorb Dn So: A Beginner's Course in Yorb (Part 1), I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Or'k, Women, and the Past in a Yorb Town, and co-author (with Bayo Ogundijo) of Yorb Popular Theatre: Three Plays by the Oyin Adjobi Company. She has edited Readings in African Popular Culture and Self-assertion and Brokerage: Early Cultural Nationalism in West Africa. She is co-editor (with P. F. de Moraes Farias) of Discourse and Its Disguises: The Interpretation of African Oral Texts, and (with John Collins and Alain Ricard) of West African Popular Theater.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253338077
• ISBN-13: 978-0253338075
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,998,143 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)