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    Speaking Our Selves

    External Review of Whole Manuscript

    New Plays by African Women

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    Contributor(s)
    Kawe, Asiimwe Deborah (editor)
    Vorlicky, Robert H. (editor)
    Language
    English
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Speaking Our Selves brings together eight remarkable plays by women writers from the under-represented African countries of Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Mali, Burundi, Benin, and Sudan, plus a play by award-winning Ugandan playwright and volume coeditor Asiimwe Kawe. Four of the plays are translated into English from Kiswahili, French, or Kirundi and French, while most of the plays preserve African indigenous languages, including Runyankore, Lusoga, Mina, Fon, Bambara, Luganda, Kiswahili, and Kirundi. Although the plays are united in presenting women as central figures who own their voices, they also represent a rich diversity of story-telling. Each unique dramaturgy is rooted in African forms of story-telling that occasionally merge with recognizable Western forms to create hybrid, dramatic forms. These hybrid methods emphasize the striking ways in which African women writers continue to experiment with form, moving beyond Western-influenced dramaturgy if and when it jeopardizes their authentic ways of artistic expression and creation through language, movement, and music, centered in African Cosmology. The plays within Speaking Our Selves confront a range of ideas and issues, including women embracing the potential of agency in often contested subject positions; confronting their historical object positions in worlds of devastating patriarchal authority; resisting toxic masculinity and persistent, oppressive binaries of gender roles; finding power in communities of women; increasing their acumen in financial, business, and economic spheres; facing tensions between traditional religious tenets and efforts toward secularization; living with perpetual acts of violence toward their bodies; and the rising mental health issues among girls and women across the continent. Readers and audiences are challenged by these plays not to be passive witnesses by observing from safe vantage points, but rather to be active participants in the stories being told.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/98676
    Keywords
    African Women Playwrights, 21st Century Anthology of African Women Playwrights, African forms of story-telling, Plays by African women, Plays by African women in English, Playwrights from Sub-Saharan Africa, Playwrights in East Africa, Post-Independence African Theatre, Black Women Theatre makers, Esi Sutherland-Addy, Asiimwe Deborah Kawe, Celma Costa, Jeanne Diama, Claudia Munyengabe, Alaa Taha, Meaza Worku, Natalie Hounvo Yekpe, Penina Mlama Muhando, Robert Vorlicky, Judith Miller, Joshua Williams, Rivardo Niyonizigiye, Nathalie Hounvo Yekpe, Judith G. Miller
    DOI
    10.3998/mpub.12827650
    ISBN
    9780472077212, 9780472057214, 9780472904839
    Publisher
    University of Michigan Press
    Publisher website
    https://www.press.umich.edu/
    Publication date and place
    2025
    Classification
    Plays, playscripts
    Theatre studies
    Pages
    297
    Public remark
    Funder name: The Herbert A. and Bessie W. Kenyon Dramatic Library
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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