Whose Theatre, Whose Africa? Wole Soyinka's <i>The Road</i> on the Road
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I explore the question of whal happens when African literary and dramatic texlS travel. Using the example of one of the major works of Wole Soyinka's corpus, The Road, I pose the following question: In what resides the "Africanness" of African literary and dramatic texts, and how does this "Africanness" fare when African texts travel? In other words, I explore how the markers, signs, and codes of "Africanness" are read, decoded, reconfigured, and, above all, appropriated when African texts travel. Although the three ins lances of "traveling" that I shall explore in the staging of The Road all took place outside Africa, I wish to emphasize that both the practical and the theoretical implications of my observations and reflections in the article also apply to the "traveling" of African literary and dramatic texts within the African continent. Although I shall presently give a fuller elaboration of the term "Africanness" and why I make it so central to my observations and analyses in this article, it is perhaps useful to stale here that in deploying this term here, I am drawing upon and also expanding on the sense in which one can talk of social realities, practices. texts, discourses, and expressive codes that are "Canadian," "Cherokee," Chinese," or "Central American" — without thereby implying that what are specifically "Canadian." "Cherokee:" "Chinese," or "Central American" in objects and practices so designated cannot be found in other parts of the world. Given this widespread common-sense approach to social identification, why the extrapolation and scrutiny of the "Africanness" of a play written by an African playwright should become the subject of an academic article is precisely the point of departure for this essay.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".