Of gaps and scars: a voyage in Tejumola Olaniyan’s performance theories and the throes of postcoloniality

Abstract

“The gap,” Tejumola Olaniyan asserts in a 2009 article, “is the specter that haunts performance…the force that determines the genres and languages of performance.…all our performances are ways of bridging the gap.” Olaniyan speaks here of the dialectics and throes of performance, arguing that the gap articulates an intervening space between what is and imaginaries of what should be. Drawing on this intervention, this paper proposes that the gap functions not only as a cultural performative but also as a way of understanding Olaniyan’s perennial engagement with the scars of coloniality and the throes of postcoloniality. I link the theory of the gap with Olaniyan’s first important book, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, and demonstrate how the gaps/scars mantra is apposite in his readings in postcolonial dramaturgy. I read Olaniyan against playwrights like Femi Osofisan and others to demonstrate how performances serve to bridge and breach aesthetic and political gaps.

Keywords:

• Tejumola Olaniyan
• performance gaps
• Africa
• language
• audience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Senghor’s exact words are “We express ourselves in French since French has a universal vocation and since our message is also addressed to French people and others. In our languages [i.e., African languages] the halo that surrounds the words is by nature merely that of sap and blood; French words send out thousands of rays like a diamond” (qtd. in Ngũgĩ, “Language of African Literature” 444).

2 I borrowed this phrase (“gaps and dents in […] ideological armour”) from Jeyifo, who used it in relation to Soyinka’s dramaturgy (“Ideology and Tragic Epistemology” 35).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Omotayo Oloruntoba-Oju

Omotayo Oloruntoba-Oju is Professor of Dramatic Literature, with emphasis on African, Caribbean, and African American studies. Her degrees, from the Universities of Ilorin and Ibadan, are in English and Performing/Theater Arts. She has lectured at the university level for over thirty years and currently lectures in the English Studies Department of Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, in Nigeria. She has produced and directed several plays and in 2010 was involved in setting up her university’s theater troupe, which she ran as its pioneer director for seven years. She also developed the curriculum for and was the founding head of the institution’s Department of the Performing Arts. Professor Oloruntoba-Oju is an international scholar with several publications in reputable local and international journals, and she has made presentations at international conferences in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Her publications include “From Alarinjo to Arugba…” (African Identities), “The Redness of Blackness” and “Theatre of the Rooted and of the Uprooted” (Caribbean Quarterly), “Myth, Meta-Aestheticism and the Challenges of Femi Osofisan’s Dramaturgy” (AWP: Magazine and Media), “Models in the Construction of Female Identity in Nigerian Postcolonial Literature” (Tydskrift vir Letterkunde), and Towards an African Theatre Aesthetics (Lambert Academic Publishing).