Matzke, Christine, Lena van der Hoven, Christopher Odhiambo and Hilde Roos. 2020. African Theatre 19: Opera and Music Theatre. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
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Music is often cited as a central artistic mode in African theatre and performance practices. However, little attention has been paid to music theatre on the continent in general, and to opera in particular, with the exceptions ofa few noted genres, such as Concert Party or the Yorùbá "folk opera" of the 1960s, and the emerging research on opera culture in South Africa.
This volume of African Theatre highlights the diversity across the continent from a variety of perspectives - including those of genre, media, and historiography. Above all, it raises questions and encourages debate: What does "opera" mean in African and African diasporic contexts? What are its practices and legacies - colonial, postcolonial and decolonial; what is its relation to the intersectionalities of race and class? How do opera and music theatre reflect, change or obscure social, political and economic realities? How are they connected to educational and cultural institutions, and non-profit organisations? And why is opera contradictorily, at various times, perceived as both "grand" and "elitist, "folk" and "quotidian", "Eurocentric" and "indigenous"?
Contributors also address aesthetic transformation processes, the porousness of genre boundaries and the role of space and place, with examples ranging from Egypt to South Africa, from Uganda to West Africa and the USA.
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