This Is Your Mother's Performance Studies: How Efua Sutherland Gave Birth to a Field

• In Event: Ghost Rivers of Global Black Studies: African Intellectual Ancestors from Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa

Abstract

In this essay, I explore Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland’s innovative research on African drama in the sixties that lay the foundation for contemporary Performance Studies. I turn to her old lecture notes, production notes, syllabi, manuscripts, workshops, and conference programs, developed during her time as a Research Fellow with the University of Ghana, Legon to reconstruct her praxis, which theorized everyday life as a social drama, developed a methodology for staging her ethnographic research, and advocated for community-engaged theater. This paper delves into her unknown contributions to the field and invites us to question whose intellectual contributions are made visible and recognized as canonical. What might my performance scholarship and practice look like in a parallel world where Efua Sutherland was my intellectual foremother and I had never heard of my forefather, Victor Turner? What new insights about the field emerge when we decenter Western scholars as the bearers of our intellectual lineage?

Author

• Nikki Yeboah, University of Washington