A reminder that Sola Adeyemi‘s talk Refracted from the Canon: The Transmuted Form of Europe’s Ambassador to Africa will take place on Thursday 26 May 2022, at 6 pm BST (online).
This is the third of three events in the CCL’s Postcolonial Theatre series, May 2022
In this presentation, Sola Adeyemi will explore the idea of tragedy from the perspective of Yoruba culture, framing this exploration from the refracted premise of classical European canon and how the meaning of tragedy has been altered to become part of the arsenal of anticolonial agency as deployed to the consecrated ritual space of the Yoruba people of West Africa. Focusing on the re-reading – or re-interpretation – of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarkand Euripides’ Bacchae, the talk aims to show that the process of re-interpreting the essence of the canonical god in the new space of Yoruba culture, or of translating the attributes with a new understanding and awareness, is more dialectical and more interwoven than the historical or anthropological process of re-working canonical texts by African writers…. Read more.
Attendance is free but booking will be essential to receive a link to attend.
The talk will be recorded and a video will be posted on the event’s webpage as soon as possible after the end.
Dr Sola Adeyemi is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of East Anglia. His researches are in world theatre and performance studies, African Literary Studies, and postcolonial literature and theatre (and the themes of decolonial and Global South studies). He is the author of Vision of Change in African Drama: Deconstructing Identity and Reconfiguring History (2019). Currently, he is working on ‘Dramatizing the Postcolony: Nigerian Drama and Theatre. His latest research is on performances after apartheid in South Africa and in Nigeria after the military dictatorship morphed into situations of ‘undeclared’ pre-colonial feudalistic insurrections, titled “Laughing from Both Barrels: New Satire in Modern African Performances”.
Sola’s talk will be chaired by Professor Samuel Kasule. Professor Kasule holds a BA in English and Drama and Diploma in Education from Makerere University, Uganda, and MA in Theatre Studies and PhD in Drama and Theatre from the University of Leeds. He is a founding member of the African Theatre Association and founding Reviews Editor of African Performance Review (APR). He was the President of the African Theatre Association between 2014 and 2020. His latest work (with Osita Okagbue) is Theatre and Performance in East Africa (London: Routledge, 2021).