Afrika, Solo

Edited by: Ric Knowles

The plays in this anthology pit individual against community and cause readers to rethink the associations placed on skin colour, language, and assumptions regarding someone’s past. “Home away from home”; the road to Canada, for some, has meant an abrupt uprooting from an African home. For others, a lineage of Canadian heritage does not equate with “belonging” through the eyes of their communities. Ric Knowles has compiled a collection of pieces from playwrights who explore where home, identity, and race commingle.

In Afrika Solo, Djanet Sears follows her roots back four hundred years to Africa to find a missing link. In a piece that changes time frames, sings, dances, and collides with pop-culture references, Sears explores home, heritage, and identity, in this fast-paced, potent play. A Canadian present, an African past; Sears finds herself in both.

In Come Good Rain, George Seremba brings us to Uganda in the 1970s and 80s to revisit a night where the eye of then-president, Milton Obote, turned its ferocious gaze on him. Come Good Rain is a candid portrait of Seremba’s experience; an incredible tale from the core of one of Uganda’s darkest moments.

A third-generation Canadian faces a crisis in belonging in Je me souviens. Divided by language, isolated due to her skin colour, and lost in the social and political margins, Lorena Gale’s play shows life through her eyes as she struggles to claim identity and belonging on her own terms. Written in part as a reaction to Jacques Parizeau’s remarks about “ethnics” following the 1995 Quebec referendum, Gale’s piece calls into question the rules of identity and place in Canada.

AUTHOR

Ric Knowles

Ingrid Mündel is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She has articles published in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Literature, and Postcolonial Text, and she co-edited a special issue of The Review of Pedagogy, Education, and Cultural Studies.

Awards

There are no awards found for this book.
Excerpts & Samples ×
There are no other resources for this book.

Reader Reviews

Accessibility Detail

Accessibility summary

Details

Dimensions:

160 Pages
9.00in * 5.90in * .40in
.20lb
260.00gr

Published:

April 22, 2011

ISBN:

9780887548390

Book Subjects:

DRAMA / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

No author posts found.

Related Blog Posts

There are no posts with this book.