Pindar’s Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts by Tom Phillips

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 576-577
Author(s):  
Anna Uhlig
Keyword(s):  
Performance Poetry ◽  
Tom Phillips ◽  
Material Texts

AFRICAN LITERATURE AND INDIGENOUS RELIGION: A STUDY OF WOLE SOYINKA’S DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN AND D.O. FAGUNWA’S ADIITU OLODUMARE

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-20
Author(s):  
Femi Abodunrin
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Knowledge System ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Indigenous Religion ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
World Today ◽  
Metaphysical Presupposition ◽  
Performance Poetry

Religious bigotry pervades our world today. As the 21st century oscillates between what Ramin Jahanbegloo (2015) has described as the politicisation of religion and its accompanying ideologisation, this study examines the vast array of literary creativity and indigenous religion/knowledge from an ecocritical viewpoint. By indigenous, it is meant those systems of knowledge and production of knowledge that are sometimes perceived as antithetical to the Western empirical systems. Encapsulated in myths and mythical wisdom, these indigenous values have at the centre of their philosophical presuppositions a symbiotic strategy that seeks to integrate man with nature. The study examines Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and D.O. Fagunwa’s Adiitu Olodumare [The Mysteries of God, Olu Obafemi (trans)], in particular, and the indigenous religious/knowledge system that they reiterate, in general, as distinct from the Western monotheistic system in ontological and metaphysical terms. Also, largely because the metaphysical presupposition of Yoruba religion is essentially performance poetry in motion, a carnivalesque perspective is employed to account for the folkloric and other elements of carnival often described as ‘the feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal’.

Emotions in performance: Poetry and preaching

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-102
Author(s):  
Carla Petievich ◽  
Max Stille
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Performance Poetry ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Nation State

Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as ‘mushāʿira’ in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as ‘waʿz mahfil’ in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners’ experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers’ narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across ‘religious’, ‘political’, and ‘poetic’ realms—and thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.

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