Abstracts

Imoinda 's return act: the making of community and the quest of the political

Dr Mina Karavanta ( University of Athens , Greece )

Is Imoinda Joan Anim-Addo's response and critical return to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko an attempt to "correct" or fill in the gaps of history by giving voice to the predominantly silent in Behn's text black woman? I would rather argue that, occasioned by such a need that Behn's text--radical and provocative in its own and later times--posits, Imoinda performs the gesture of a critical revisionism that does not repeat a simple return to the past in order to complete and amend it but rather produces an imaginary genealogy that attends to the future, the text's and ours. Imoinda's intertextual, interdiscursive, and intercultural modality constitutes it as a literary text that, in excavating and rewriting those ruins and fragments of history that, occlude by the master narratives of history, persist as they have their own stories to tell, first imagines and then invents its community-to-come, which emerges not only as Imoinda's immediate and bleak community in the plantation farm but also as the shared, albeit disconnected, communities of the diasporic and dispossessed peoples proliferated by the imperialist and capitalist routes across the Atlantic and other slave-trade zones, the communities of shared destiny or shared fate, as Etienne Balibar has put it, of a global and postnational, and yet still trapped in localisms and nationalisms, present. In my presentation, I will demonstrate how Imoinda challenges our understanding of the present as a present that can no longer be thought in strictly national, religious and/or ethnic terms as it posits the need to rethink the political in terms that require the critical praxis of a postnational imaginary, what I would like to call the praxis of ontopolitical critique.

Beyond Text: Travels with Imoinda

Dr Joan Anim-Addo (Goldsmiths, University of London , UK )

As a character, Imoinda travels from West African interior to unknown coastal places and even further through a seemingly unending ‘lashing and roaring’ to land upon unfamiliar Caribbean island space. Yet within Behn’s imaginative geographies, Imoinda’s voice had already been displaced and articulated through European concerns, as she is first spoken for by an English author. It took over three hundred years for Imoinda’s trajectories to return to her characterisation, as voiced by an African-Caribbean author resident in the U.K. The fact that Imoinda was first published in a bi-lingual English-Italian edition indicates how an additional network of textual travels, and transatlantic journeys have shaped Imoinda within-text and beyond-text. Joan Anim-Addo interrogates the relationship between her physical trajectories from Grenada to Europe , Africa and the USA with Imoinda, to explore the musical theatre text as circum-Atlantic cultural negotiation and navigational performance.

 

Where Imagination Hits Reality: Visualising the Self in Imoinda

Dr Raimi Gbadamosi (Artist and Curator, London , UK )

Visualising Imoinda, as a codification of collective experience, has been a pleasant imaginative revelation. Having so far not seen Imoinda being performed live, I have constructed my own visual narrative to accompany my engagement, enjoying the pleasure of having my mind devise what people within the text (ought to) look like, what spaces smell like, what it means to be the objectified, and what each person sounds like. I cannot see the faces of the people I have come to know, but I recognise them time after time again, in the faces I see around me based on the parameters I have set for them.

Reading , rather than looking, necessitates that I become all the people within the text as I encounter them. I speak their words and am obliged to understand their motives, regardless of whether I approve of their actions or not.

I know what the people in my imagined narrative look like, not that they will then look like anything I will produce as a drawing, I still await the possibility of colliding with the compiled archetype, I can even tell the fragrance they wear. I am free to devise histories, have experiences outside the presented text. It is this extension that my presentation will address. I am interested in the minutiae, the little things that make the text real to the reader. The phenomenological relationship between reader and text, the creation of the ‘new author’ (as against the ‘death of the author’) is what fascinates me.

Against this backdrop I will look at Imoinda as a visualised text, from a (re)creation of history to identification with the self.

Imoinda , Or She Who Will Creolize Europe

Dr Giovanna Covi ( University of Trento , Italy )

My presentation illustrates the experience of publishing the first edition of Imoinda; translating Imoinda into Italian; and conceptualizing interculturality through the practice of publishing and translating Imoinda in Italy . I will address the issue of the effects produced by Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda through such questions as: what was I seeking with the publication and translation of Imoinda in Italy ? Why did I consider it an action worth pursuing, a culturally and politically vital act? Why do I still believe that this text would make a difference in European society if it were made to reach larger audiences through performance? What obstacles did I encounter as translator that enables me to feel that Imoinda’s effects on the Italian language and hence thinking are also significant?

Beyond Text: Aural

Glenn L. McClure (Composer, SUNY Geneseo , USA )

Alan Tirre (Musical Producer and Conductor, SOTA , USA )

We will examine the creation of a musical setting of "Imoinda" by Teaching Artist/Composer Glenn McClure and the students of School of the Arts in inner city Rochester , NY USA .  Students worked closely with a variety of professionals to research elements of the Atlantic Slave Trade (illustrated in the libretto), writing music that added an additional artistic layer of meaning, and perform the piece with high level costumes, staging, etc.  We will discuss the ways that the text and music reflected and enhanced each other.  We will also examine the ways in which this project enhanced Academic and Arts learning.  Of particular interest was the way in which collaborative art making gave birth to new insights about racial relations in an inner city high school.  Glenn McClure will discuss the overall design of the project and Alan Tirre will discuss the musical direction and the school partnership.

 

The Choice of Opera for a Revisionist Tale: Imoinda as Neo-Slave Narrative

Professor Maria Helena Lima (SUNY Geneseo , USA )

As the contemporary art of time, opera creates and transforms history, inviting a contemporary audience to see the present in terms of the past.   Joan Anim-Addo retells the story from the point of view of the African princess, making significant changes in the plot.  By fully developing Esteizme, Imoinda's maid, Anim-Addo makes her not only the representative of a "purer" African culture, but she serves as source of support and counsel for Imoinda, particularly during the Middle Passage and in the "New" World.  It is Esteizme who encourages the others on the ship to 'Take courage! See how we weather the storm!' (98).

Conditions of slave and post-slavery survival in the British West Indies indicate the significance of a gendered female identity, specifically related to the role of “other”.  When newly transplanted, Africans lost language, status, culture and family; they had to find a way to survive in a hostile environment.  Anim-Addo's _Imoinda_, then, uses Behn's story only as a point of departure for, in her version, both mother and baby survive.  Following the birth of her daughter, a child of rape by the white man, Imoinda mourns the circumstances of her child's birth, but Esteizme claims the child is 'hope for new life again'.  Imoinda's child thus represents the emergent nation, the Caribbean nation, while Oroonoko is unable to adapt to his new circumstances and kills himself in Anim-Addo's version.