Moderator:
Location: Room B4285
In-Person Session
JUSTICE BEING SERVED IN A WHITE CALABASH: INTERTEXTUALITY, MYTH AND THE POWER OF WOMEN IN AHMED YERIMA’S MOJAGBE
This reading of Ahmed Yerima’s play Mojagbe explores the collective power of women in ensuring good governance, equity and justice in the traditional African society. Mojagbe is a historical diffusion of kingship autocracy and the recurrent abuse of power in most modern African States. Generally, there is less focus on the strength of women in enhancing socio-political change in African playwriting. Therefore, this reading intends to heighten Yerima’s histrionic intentions in Mojagbe to mainstream the collective aspirations of women, wielding all their reactionary powers as custodians of the land, to check the abuse of power that is effusive of Oba Mojagbe’s serial homicide, matricide and usurpation of power. Qualitative, intertextual and thematic analyses will be used to explore the concept of justice; checks and balances in monarchical power; the role of women as custodians of traditional norms and values, and their dogged fight to bring Oba Mojagbe to justice. Justice is sacred. It derives its efficacy from the highest moral and metaphysical rubrics of equity, good conscience and retribution. Injustice, in whatever form it appears breeds communal, social and spiritual dislocation. The reading will also attempt to re-envision the mythopoeic essence of Motunrayo, the slave-girl and harbinger of death in Mojagbe, as refractive of the legendary Moremi of 12th Century Yoruba history. Finally, we hope that this paper will contribute towards the extension of discourse on the engagement of justice, myth, power, women, intertextuality and postcolonialism in contemporary African drama and performance.
Michael Anyanwu
Michael Anyanwu holds a B.A. and Master of Fine Art (MFA) Theatre Arts, University of Calabar; M.Sc. Mass Communication and LL. B, Law, University of Lagos; BL (Nigeria Law School); Global Cultural Fellowship, (IICR), University of Edinburgh, and Ph.D, Theatre Arts. Lagos State University. He wrote and directed several plays and musicals in the National Troupe of Nigeria from 1989 until his withdrawal of service in February 2023 as the Director (Drama). He presently resides in the UK.
Performing Reproductive Justice, Race, and Radical Motherhood in the Television Adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale
A group of women dressed in red robes with white bonnets descend on Capitol Hill to defend abortion rights. This may seem like a scene from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or its television adaptation (2017), but it is only one of many real-world protests that have mobilized the handmaid costume from Atwood’s stories. White women have been quick to embrace the visual power of Atwood’s narrative to fight for access to abortion, but this vision of justice is incomplete and highly racialized. Reproductive justice extends a white feminist focus on abortion to fight for three basic rights: the rights to have, not have, and parent a child in a safe and healthy environment (Ross and Solinger 2017). Set in the future, The Handmaid’s Tale imagines the United States as a theocracy that enslaves women and forces them to reproduce, but it gives short shrift to the racism that would surely underpin this world. Just as The Handmaid’s Tale novel has been critiqued for appropriating a slave narrative, the television adaptation has come under scrutiny for its race-blind casting. The novel, the TV show, and the political protests all ignore racialized reproductive rights and experiences by presenting white women’s concerns as universal.
Taking an intersectional feminist approach, this paper will examine the first two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation and its depiction of racialized motherhood. I argue that motherhood is what makes the characters radical: their maternal caregiving is the motivation and mechanism for their resistance against the oppressive regime. But is this radical motherhood only available to white mothers? The television series presents the maternal subject as a figure of protest, but also shows Offred (the titular handmaid) discriminating against a Black handmaid who enjoys having children and does not conform to Offred’s ideal of radical maternity. Ultimately, season two of The Handmaid’s Tale exposes Offred’s exclusionary radical maternalism and punishes her for it. My paper will end by asking: how does race in The Handmaid’s Tale impact the archetype of radical motherhood today?
Kailin Wright, St. Francis Xavier University
Kailin Wright is an Associate Professor, Jules Léger Research Chair, and award-winning teacher at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX). She is the author of Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2020) as well as the critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s The God of Gods: A Canadian Play and articles in Theatre Journal, Canadian Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Kailin is also Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review and Fiction Editor at The Antigonish Review.