Creating a network on and off-line, in and out of Africa: African Women Playwright Network

ABSTRACT

This article compares and analyses factors that impact when creating a network on both online and live networking platforms, designed as spaces for artistic and critical engagement both within Africa and beyond. As I draw on the African Womens’ Playwright Network as my example, I consider how we can acknowledge the materiality of the processes and relationships involved in these kinds of networks, which as Stephansen argues, also involve the making of new publics. In this analysis I particularly reflect on the impact of using Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s approach to decolonising indigenous research methodologies when creating a cross-cultural network.

KEYWORDS:

• Networking
• digital
• African
• women
• playwrights

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Steve Ranford and Warwick IT for technical advice and help with data collection and analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yvette Hutchison is a Reader in the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Warwick who researches Anglophone African theatre, history and narratives of memory, and the afterlives of colonialism. She is associate editor of the South African Theatre Journal and the African Theatre series.

Steve Ranford is Senior Academic Technologist in the University of Warwick’s Digital Humanities Academic Technologies Team. He has contributed to over 20 projects in the Arts faculty and has been central to the conceptualising and data analysis involved in this project.

ORCID

Yvette Hutchison http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3199-0305

Notes

1. This is paralleled in African literature awards, where there are a number of prestigious awards for prose fiction - the Noma award, the Caine Prize for African Writing, English, the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Potentially the EBRD Literature Prize, launched in 2017 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in partnership with the British Council and the London Book Fair, and the Wole Soyinka Prize for literature in Africa would consider a playwright, and the Prince Klaus fund has awarded playwrights as laureates. But there is no specific award for African Theatre yet. However, national associations do acknowledge playwriting. For example, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), the second runner-up for its Drama Prize in 2018 was a woman, Achalugo Ezekobe.

2. This functionality E1M developed with and for us and has since been rolled out to other clients.

3. Examples include: In 2016 the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester approached us as they sought to commission a female Kenyan playwright for their project BIRTH; Equity in Theatre, Canada, reached out to ‘help promote the activities and programming of AWPN’, and the Arcola Theatre, London, called for plays by African women on specific topics or areas, like LGBTQ (2017). In 2018 the Camargo Foundation, France, advertised a four-week residency for mid-career/established African playwrights, the Arterial Network called for new designs for their logo and visual identity design for the African Culture Fund, and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development (Netherlands) called for proposals for the Next Generation 2018, to support one-year initiatives by artists from Africa and Middle east between 15–30 years of age.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, reference [grant number AH/M008096/1], Networking Women’s theatre in Africa.