Postdramatic African Theater and the Critique of Representation

Abstract

This dissertation is an examination of the question of representation—that is, the literary text’s relationship to the real—through the theater of Kossi Efoui, an African writer who is alternatively identified as Togolese or from the Gulf of Guinea. In Efoui’s theater, places and characters are often unnamed. His plays are metatheatrical, with extraneous discourse and without coherent narrative, and all of this serves to distance the reader/spectator from the real of an implicitly African experience located in them. Because of its metatheatricality, its only partially meaningful language, and its static narrative structure, this dissertation reads Efoui’s theater as an instance of postdramatic African theater, using terminology introduced by the critic Hans-Thies Lehmann. Postdramatic theater refers to a certain subset of theater that arose in Europe in the late twentieth century and was characterized by its lack of story and world. It features an autonomization of language and mechanical movement, with speaking figures rather than actual characters, and an emphasis on sound, decor, and gesture that displaces a hierarchy where the text is most important and eschews the cathartic function of drama. Efoui’s theater bears these hallmarks of postdramatic theater. Over four chapters, this dissertation interrogates and displaces the anti-identitarian reading of the theater of Efoui and other 1990s Francophone playwrights alongside whom he is typically read. It compares the abstract places in this 1990s theater with the fictive states of canonical African literature and articulates a theory of lightness and play in Efoui’s theater. It traces possession trance as a theme in Efoui’s work and identifies intertextual possession and glossolalia as methods in his theatrical language and the way that he deterritorializes meaning. It stages Efoui’s critique of representation from an ethical standpoint and reads his metatheatrical characters as a potential alternative to psychologically realist characters. Finally, it reads the deconstruction of the unity of time and classical narrative structure as the final way that Efoui’s theater keeps its audience at arm’s length. Efoui’s theater evades interpretation and thus refuses the expectations of spectators who seek from his work the confirmation of a fixed image of Africa under the guise of cultural authenticity, or a transparent representation of the suffering of Africans from which they can make claims about the truth of the world. And it critiques the spectacularization and objectification of people in literature and media. By granting characters freedom from transparency and a being easily understood, Efoui shields the text from the consumptive and extractive modalities of reception that would otherwise attend it and reveals the emancipatory possibilities of an African modernism.