Revisioning Allegory: Wilson Harris\u27s Carnival

In each of his eighteen works of fiction published over the past quarter century, Wilson Harris has focused on the question of how to effect \u27genuine change\u27 within history\u27s \u27phenomenal legacy\u27 of monumental, seemingly totalising tradition and the conceptual biases it carries, and, in consequence, his novels tend to return to the same closely delimited ground of thematic concern and stylistic voice. Motifs, images, characters, and plot patterns recur throughout his oeuvre, giving rise to the perception that Harris\u27s later work continues to draw from the \u27overreaching vision\u27^ of his first novel Palace of the Peacock, re-examining its implications for social change and for the performance, the grounding, of fiction itself. But as Harris has noted, \u27one novel may pick up something in the fabric of a previous work and rehearse its implications anew, revise, revision itself. and in this process of\u27revisioning\u27 Harris seizes on subtle differences in apparendy similar fictional constructs, reaching always for a mode of writing \u27that seeks through complex rehearsal to consume its own biases\u27.^ As Gregor\^ Shaw notes, the \u27cycle\u27 of Harris\u27s novels is more accurately viewed as \u27progressive or incremental\u27: \u27in dialectical terms, each succeeding stage may be said to cancel the revelations of its predecessors, but it also presei\u27x-es them and raises them to a higher level.\u27\u27 In this way, Harris\u27s novels can be seen to be engaging with a tradition of the author\u27s own making, the apparent unity of his fictional output standing as a trope for that seemingly monumental inheritance of histors\u27 through which Harris seeks gateways into imaginative release, and his complex process of fictional \u27rehearsal\u27 representing a means by which contemporary post-colonial society can revise and transform received forms of perception into new and liberating \u27codes of recognition\u2

Tenzing Norgay’s four flags

It is 11.30 a.m. on May 29th, 1953; and though Europe now lies dormant in post-war exhaustion, although global decolonisation from the once great European empires is proving itself everywhere to be an unstoppable force, the paradigmatic moment in British imperial self-representation is about to go down. Two men stand roped together on top of the world’s highest mountain. The first is a beekeeper from New Zealand: a citizen of the old, white Commonwealth of nations. The second proves a little more difficult to define. Ethnically, he identifies himself as a ‘Sherpa’ — by which he means in part that he comes from Mongolian background, via Tibet. Nationally, because born in Nepal but now living in Darjeeling, he calls himself Nepali, but sometimes Indian, and sometimes Nepali- Indian. Linguistically, he identifies Sherpa as his mother tongue — this language derives from Tibetan

Introduction

\u27A second epoch of colonisation\u27 - this is how Wole Soyinka characterises Western theoretical practice as it applies itself, even with the best of intentions, to the cultural productions of the non-Western world. And it would be fair to say that post-colonial writing - by which we mean writing that is grounded in the cultural realities of those societies whose subjectivity has been constituted at least in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism - contains hundreds of such statements: statements which lay bare the material, often devastating, consequences of a centuries-long imposition of Euro-American conceptual patterns onto a world that is at once \u27out there\u27 and yet thoroughly assimilable to the psychic grasp of Western cognition

Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis

In this essay we attempt to map out a conceptual framework for analyzing a cluster of related practices subsumed under the broad banner of "cross-cultural theatre". For the purposes of our discussion, cross-cultural theatre encompasses public performance practices characterized by the conjunction of specific cultural resources at the level of narrative content, performance aesthetics, production processes, and/or reception by an interpretive community. The cultural resources at issue may be material or symbolic, taking the form of particular objects or properties, languages, myths, rituals, embodied techniques, training methods, and visual practices - or what James Brandon calls "cultural fragments" (1990:92). Cross-cultural theatre inevitably entails a process of encounter and negotiation between different cultural sensibilities, although the degree to which this is discernible in any performance event will vary considerably depending on the artistic capital brought to a project as well as the location and working processes involved in its development and execution

Oral literature in South Africa: 20 years on

I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the significant implications have been, what remain challenges, and how we may think of, or rethink, orality and performance studies in a present and future that are changing at almost inconceivable pace.DHE