First-Century Christians in Twenty-First Century Africa: Between Law and Grace in Gabon and Madagascar

Abstract

This is an instance where a comparative methodology evades greater clarity, and escorts us to confront performance in a fog. Cole frames some of the Black choreographers in the book as products of non-racialist “pioneers” (7) who trained and “launched” (130) their careers, and the reader is left to interrogate the ideological implications of historicizing South African contemporary dance as solely inaugurated by white “pioneers.”While these “pioneering” figureheads contributed significantly to formal performance training, was the pedagogical relationship not symbiotic (even if asymmetrical), as the novices brought their own expertise in indigenous African and urban performance forms that were central to fashioning a distinguishable contemporary South African performance aesthetic? Tellingly, she does not attribute the work and success of white artists to paternalistic pioneers. Even as she acknowledges the fraught nature of artistic tutelage (131), she canonizes the likes of Orlin by venerating their efforts at endowing Black performers with “new visibility” (131). The risk of this move is its framing of Black “visibility” as a philanthropic gift from benevolent white pioneers. This misses the opportunity to be curious about contemporary artistic innovations that are not tied to these pioneers’ inner circuits. In other words, what “new modes” (7) of post-apartheid performance exist in opposition to these mainstream but tightly gate-kept circles? In Cole’s emphatic theorization, what remains understated is a powerful and well-resourced retaliatory will that either crushes anticolonial will or co-opts it in seductive ways that even some of the artists discussed in the book have not had the capacity to fully resist (their “will” notwithstanding). African (diasporic) performance theory stands to gain more explanatory power by dwelling longer in the ambivalences the book implicitly identifies and the contradictions pervading the book’s arguments. In addition to re-assessing the gravitas assigned to “returning the gaze” and symbolic reparation, the field has yet to seriously examine what the mystification of these ambivalences enacts. If the artists discussed in Cole’s book assert a “refusal of audience appetites for coherence” (7), this might invite less certitude about the putative “legibility” (79) of their will and instead reveal the notion of the will as always already coeval with coercion and co-optation in this context.