Contemporary sub-Saharan theater in French and the aesthetics of the mask

The present dissertation analyzes plays by Koffi Kwahu1e (Ivory Coast), Kossi Efoui (Togo), Jose Pliya (Benin), Caya Makhe1e (Congo), Koulsy Lamko (Tchad), and Ousmane Aledji (Benin) to disclose how a growing number of sub-Saharan playwrights use theater as a means of aesthetic delocalization, i.e. to dramatize local issues in ways that speak to global communities. This work provides theoretical approaches to the steady and significant development of Sub-Saharan theater in French since the publication of Kossi Efoui's play The Crossroads (Le Carrefour) in 1989.;From the beginning of colonial theater in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1930s until the end of the 1980s, Francophone theater remained typically a local phenomenon with only rare opportunities for international exposure. Only a few of the playwrights were known beyond the borders of their own countries. Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, sub-Saharan theater in French increasingly produces plays and performances acclaimed in Africa and throughout the world. This dissertation in four chapters analyzes how the expansion of contemporary sub-Saharan theater coincides with the playwrights' consistent use of dramatic techniques that speak to audiences across national and cultural borders.;The first chapter, "Non-Space and Histrionic Time," studies present uses of spatio-temporality and contrasts contemporary theater with preceding forms of African drama. This chapter reveals "non-space" to be the consistent and dominant form of spatiality in present African theater in French. Chapter two, entitled "Metatheater and Intertextuality," analyzes role-playing and play-acting that establish a critical distance in the representation of contemporary African identities. It also examines how this theater creatively dialogues with a diverse body of classical, modern, as well as postmodern literary and cultural forms to complicate and enrich its dramatized stories. The third chapter studies how characters are imagined and constructed in this theater. This chapter entitled "Body Politics," tackles current forms of characterization dominated by recourse to techniques of doubling and fragmentation. The fourth chapter, "Mask and Masquerade," argues that contemporary playwrights draw on the mask as symbol and metaphor to subvert stereotypes and denounce established forms of oppression.