Autumn 1996
Volume 23, Number 1

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Conclusion
The traffic in theory within the academy in recent years has certainly opened new channels of communication among disciplines and stimulated some refreshing reconsiderations about the objects and methods of scholarly inquiry. However, theory has also led, in my opinion, to some rather unconvincing applications, particularly when scholars make interpretive claims for which their disciplines provide inadequate methodological grounding. For instance, while cultural studies transforms all the world into a "text," literary scholars may not have the methodological tools and evidentiary basis to make persuasive arguments about entire cultures or historical epochs. Postcolonial theory, which is dominated by literary scholars, makes generic claims about "the postcolonial condition," a state of being that freely transgresses all historical and cultural boundaries. This leads, as Aijaz Ahmad points out, to some rather peculiar claims, as when one postcolonial primer suggests, in reference to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, that the Indian government is Islamic and that Iranian clerics are "postcolonial."52

Fig. 2 -- Bob Johnson is shown on the cover of this pamphlet in a pose and costume reminiscent of Al Jolson. Photo courtesy of Efua Sutherland. Fig. 3 -- Al Jolson singing "mammy" in The Jazz Singer, copyright Turner Entertainment Co. All rights reserved.

The concert party provides a fascinating perspective on the changing social, political, and cultural climate of one formerly colonized country.53 Blackface is but one issue in the genre's complex and varied history, though as Bame argues, it happens to be the feature that most interests many Western observers.54 Reading blackface in West Africa is complicated: Documentary evidence in colonial newspapers unsettles categorical dismissals of race as a valid line of inquiry, for race was clearly a preoccupation among some spectators six decades ago. Likewise, testimonies by veteran actors disrupt facile conclusions about the inherently subversive nature of concert party "hybridity," conclusions that contemporary theories of "the postcolonial condition" could easily authorize.55 What this study of the Ghanaian concert party demonstrates is that scholars must place "wonders" from the postcolonial world in a richly detailed historical and social context before declaring all hybrid cultural phenomena to be subversive signs.

52. See Ahmad, "The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality," p. 2.

53. Ghana, or the Gold Coast, was a British colony between 1874 and 1957.

54. See Bame, Come to Laugh, p. 6.

55. As mentioned before, according to Bhabha, hybridity "is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power ["S," p. 173]. For examples of how such theories of postcolonial "hybridity" and "ambivalence" are being applied and critiqued, see Lott, Love and Theft, p. 6, and Barber, "Literacy, Improvisation, and the Public in Yorùbá Popular Theatre," in The Pressures of the Text: Orality, Texts, and the Telling of Tales, ed. Stewart Brown (Birmingham, 1995), pp. 6-27.

Catherine M. Cole is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. She is presently at work on a history of the Ghanaian concert party.