Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity by Moses Ochonu (review)

Abstract

northern Ugandans in their use of memorialization and demands on the state for “living memorials” (252) that respond to their material needs. A different approach is taken in the book’s final chapter in which, drawing on her own experience running theater workshops in northern Uganda and Rwanda, Edmondson searches for new models of theater activism detached from its “humanitarian baggage” (287). Since, she argues, “neoliberal pressures are more easily negotiated than opposed” (271), staying at home is not an option. Instead she seeks to offer Western theater activists a guide to avoiding those pitfalls of empire discussed in the preceding chapters and tentatively concludes, borrowing from Emmanuel Lévinas, that a stance of “radical passivity” (276)—involving shared vulnerability, open-ended collaboration, and the acceptation of inaction—might be a useful, if sometimes elusive, point of departure from which to develop a more ethical approach to intercultural performance outside of the influence of empire. This explicit identification of an imagined reader in the closing pages echoes the emphasis on the perspectives of Western agents found throughout the book. While the range of source types studied is impressive, encompassing a broad variety of documents that includes the BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story, the memoirs of genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza, and Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, the early assertion that “the creative expressions of Central Africans take center stage” (10) is perhaps not fully realized, with the stimulating discussion of artists such as Judith Adong and Faustin Linyekula confined to a brief afterword. Edmondson envisages further study of these artists in a future book, but arguably a more detailed discussion of their strategies for evading the forces of state and empire would have been pertinent to this present work. Nonetheless, Performing Trauma in Central Africa offers a fascinating and highly readable interdisciplinary exploration of the insidious workings of imperial appetite in Central Africa, as seen from the standpoint of empire, which will be of great interest to regional specialists and scholars of applied theater, memory studies, and humanitarianism alike.