The Abyssinian Contortionist

Modern Drama, 2019

In this paper, I will examine two particular descriptions in Evliya Çelebi's Seyâhatname (Book of Travels) of people with physical abnormalities: a man with what may be scaphocephaly in Wallachia, and a boy with hydrocephalus in Şebinkarahisar. I will begin by utilizing the artistic and literary theory of the grotesque to explore descriptive aspects of how Evliya, as a narrator, records the characteristics of such people. Subsequently, I will examine the method through which Evliya locates and thus structures these descriptions within a particular framework; namely, that of the 'aja'ib wa ghara'ib ("wonders and marvels") mode common to medieval and early modern Islamicate travel writing. Finally, I will show how Evliya's use of such descriptions within this modal framework can be seen to complicate this mode.

The intention of this essay, is in large part, to act as an answer to a question posed by one of the characters in Onyeka Nwelue’s The Abyssinian Boy, namely ‘why should blacks always behave as though they are slaves!’ In order to address a question as significantly polemic, as inherently problematic, and as highly charged with discourse as this one clearly is I will draw from a renewed concept of ‘history’. This is primarily through the historiographic method of analysis developed by the Annales School, but which has in turn had far reaching effects through to diverse thinkers such as Foucault, and emergent intellectual paradigms such as Indian Ocean studies. Due to the fact that history is largely accessed through texts and textuality I will bring New Historicism into the argument but in a critical manner that gives an example of Western paradigmatic interests. By utilizing concepts such as ‘afro-radicalism’ and ‘nativism’ as developed by Achille Mbembe, it will be shown that “contemporary African modes of writing the self” are caught between historicist tensions that stylize Africans from the outside. In looking for new ways of conceptualizing history the work of Engseng Ho will be utilized, as an example of textual recuperation under the rubric of Indian Ocean studies which in turn leads to radical new ways of conceiving both history and the present in which we live. The work of Isabel Hofmeyr, M. P. M. Vink, and John C. Hawley have been most useful in this regard and their insights and criticisms will be brought into this analysis. Onyeka Nwelue’s The Abyssinian Boy acts as a discursive operation in this regard, in that it is one of the rare texts that can be found that gives signification to an African experience of India. This in turn points to a “fault line” in contemporary thought and agency regarding the Indian Ocean world, and as the novel is at pains to point out, African self-stylizing may force others to reconsider their own conceptions of Africa.

2021

In this email exchange between artist Elmira Abolhassani and David Revés, Abolhassani reflects on her unique journey as an Iranian artist living in Portugal, citing its international accessibility and cultural openness. She delves into her multidisciplinary background in industrial design and glass art, revealing how her artistic process intertwines with themes of identity, communication, and self-reflexivity. Abolhassani's work, characterised by its meticulous attention to materials and subjects drawn from Persian culture, invites viewers to engage with complex narratives of individual and collective experience.

Dance Research Journal

This article explores the cultural figure of the ropedancer and focuses on the influential performance of Philippe Petit in two of his walks. The high-wire walker plays a significant role discussed within three frameworks: a philosophical and urban discussion offering interwoven perspectives; the iconic walk at the World Trade Center in New York in 1974; and Petit's high-wire crossing performed in Jerusalem's geopolitical context in 1987. Ropedancing is an “abyssal choreography”—a movement at a high altitude above the depth with maximum control on the verge of losing balance. As related to specific walks, this movement embodies a dialectic agency. It transcends local narratives but empowers and critically exposes them. It requires meticulous discipline and unbounded creativity, and it is linked to oppositional positions between which the ropedancer can unsettlingly fluctuate. This movement activates danger or crisis while moving over the abyss as a vector connecting places, ...

Postscript a Journal of Graduate Criticism and Theory, 2012

Psyche is a curious though elegant narrative of "The Path of the Wanderer" as he, a stigmatized outsider within his own culture, is offered the opportunity of symbolic transformation. This mythopoetic process, in the vein of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly, involves a socially marginalized individual engaging with the Other inside himself to negotiate multiple "spheres of reality" to attain "lost" collective knowledge and reinvent his identity.

Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease and T. ObinkaramEchewa's The Crippled Dancer are two different narratives from the point of view of their orientations. No Longer at Ease is the story of defeat anda fall from respectability to infamy, while The Crippled Dancer narrates the success story of a child overcoming odds connected to birth and upbringing on the one hand and hostility from the rich and powerful on the other.

South African Theatre Journal, 2020