The agentive power of play in theatre for young people: a Zimbabwean case study

IF 1.3 Q2 ANTHROPOLOGY Critical African Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-28 DOI:10.1080/21681392.2022.2133734
K. Chinyowa, Nalini Moodley-Diar, Anre Fourie
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Popular arts are not only accessible to most people, but their stylistic features are also a crucial scholarly site of attention. Liz Gunner [1990. “Introduction: Forms of Popular Culture and the Struggle for Space.” Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (2): 199–206] regards African popular art as an empowering agency that can give people a new sense of control over their own lives. Through processes of improvisation, enactment and dialogue, such popular arts create spaces for participants to not only express themselves, but also to exercise power and authority over forces of oppression and repression. In African storytelling the trickster narrative is one of the aesthetic categories and is indeed the trope from which popular theatre in Africa has derived most of its inspiration. Using the illustrative paradigm of a popular theatre performance entitled, Vana Vana (Children are children), this article seeks to demonstrate how symbolic inversion was used to address topical issues associated with child abuse in Zimbabwe. The performance focuses on the violation of children’s rights through child labour, domestic violence, sexual abuse, child soldiers and ‘street children.’ The article examines these forms of child abuse to see how Vana Vana operates as a performative discourse that deploys trickster narrative to critique actual violations of children’s rights. The article also examines the agentive power of the young theatre facilitators and performers who were at the centre of devising the popular theatre performance through symbolic inversion. What the paper demonstrates, then, is a classic example of the performative power of popular youth theatre and its agency to critique and hold accountable a dominant culture that endangers the lives and futures of young people.
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Critical African Studies
Critical African Studies Arts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
3.00
自引率
0.00%
发文量
19
期刊介绍: Critical African Studies seeks to return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation within each of its constituent disciplines, including Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law and Economics. We offer authors a more flexible publishing platform than other journals, allowing them greater space to develop empirical discussions alongside theoretical and conceptual engagements. We aim to publish scholarly articles that offer both innovative empirical contributions, grounded in original fieldwork, and also innovative theoretical engagements. This speaks to our broader intention to promote the deployment of thorough empirical work for the purposes of sophisticated theoretical innovation. We invite contributions that meet the aims of the journal, including special issue proposals that offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into African Studies debates.
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