There is an aesthetic energy which seems to manifest across all spheres of life in African societies. My career-long quest to discover the essence and evolution of expressive culture in African communities across the globe has been most grounded in my experience of the embedding of the arts in the everyday lives of Ghana’s diverse societies.
Through an African experience based in Ghana, this paper will seek to bring my interlocutors to a wider discussion on gendered cultural performance. I will examine in some detail, ways in which the arts become a key strategy for the definition of the collective, the self and the other. Primarily in this respect, I shall discuss evidence of performed archetypes of manhood and womanhood from genres such as historically based myths and legends. Keen interest will especially be shown in the vestiges of lost pre-eminence of feminine power, the assertion of feminine agency and the performance of collaborative articulation between men and women in the quest for stable and strong societies. We might call this exercise the exploration of a gendered ontology. Crucially, to the extent that performance necessarily implies agency and the power to act, a complementary analysis of selected idioms, conventions and contexts of performance will be undertaken with a view to demonstrating parameters of women’s ownership of these factors of performance.
Finally, I will return to reflections about the pertinence of research on performance for an understanding of postcolonial African societies.
Esi Sutherland-Addy is Associate Professor of African Studies at the University of Ghana and Adjunct Professor at the New York University Study Centre in Accra. Her main Research Interests are: written and oral Literature, women’s literature as well as educational and cultural policy. Her current research projects are a) Oral Traditions and Expressive Diversity involving the collection and digitization of Ghanaian Oral Traditions and b) Archiving the works and papers of Efua Sutherland.