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IMOINDA or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) is the first libretto to be written by an African-Caribbean woman, Dr Joan Anim-Addo.[1] It is a re-writing of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, first published in 1688.
It tells the story of Oroonoko's lover Imoinda, a young African princess who is doubly enslaved, once by her king into marriage and then sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The play focuses on her experience with the slave masters and the birth of a child who symbolizes the triumphant survival of African-heritage people forcibly transplanted in the Caribbean Diaspora. In subversively re-writing Behn's 1688 proto-novel, this woman-centered narrative highlights the importance of women as repositories of cultural and historical memory, ancestral forgiveness and the maternal founding of the "Creolised Nation".
The libretto was first published in Italian (translated by Dr Giovanna Covi and Chiara Pedrotti) by the University of Trento and then later re-published in English by Mango Publishing[2] as demand for it grew. It has been performed in New York, United States. In May 2008, the State University of New York at Geneseo and the Rochester School of the Arts put on a performance with funding from the New York State Music Fund.[3]
Why Neo-Slave Narratives in the Twenty-First Century
5:15-6:30 p.m. on Friday, 06-JAN-12
# 614 Washington State Convention Center
Chair and Respondent: Maria Helena Lim
SUNY Geneseo
Lima@geneseo.edu
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, writers across the African Diaspora have attempted to recover elements of the narrative structure and thematic configuration of slave narratives.[i] The main reasons for this seemingly widespread desire to rewrite a genre that officially lost its usefulness with the abolition of slavery are the will to re-affirm the historical value of the original slave narrative and to reclaim the humanity of the enslaved by (re)imagining their subjectivity. While most colonial testimonies of slavery have long disappeared from the working memory of today’s Black Atlantic societies, the prejudices and stereotypes they conveyed unfortunately have not.
ABSTRACTS
Imoinda and the task of “double writing”: Or She Who Tells the Story of the Gendered “Signifying Minority”
Mina Karavanta
University of Athens
akarav@enl.uoa.gr
Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name as a neo-slave narrative performs a “double writing”: it does not only rewrite Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to attend to the haunting silence of Imoinda by giving her the voice and agency to tell her story in the trans-genre form of an interculturally hybrid libretto; it also reconfigures the colonial and imperial heritage of modernity in view of the present and urgent need to contemplate this heritage in a transnational and postnational way. Anim-Addo’s Imoinda does not rewrite Behn’s text to correct it by filling the gaps of Imoinda’s silence and restoring the ruins of slavery and racism that interpellates the roots of modernity that her effaced presence haunts; it creates a contrapuntal affiliation with Behn’s text, to invoke Edward Said’s crucial terms here, to translate Imoinda’s silence and haunting into the presence of what Anim-Addo calls a “signifying minority” that speaks across her own locality and history to other affiliated histories of oppression, exploitation, and expropriation. Anim-Addo’s Imoinda is a figuration of these affiliated histories, the diasporic communities that they produced and their enabling possibilities in the present; her libretto is the textual configuration of these possibilities and their promise as it grafts the past on to the present that it writes and, thus, transforms by not only representing but also and most crucially performing it.
Writing Words, Wearing Wounds: Race, Gender and Memory in a Puerto Rican Neo-Slave Narrative
[i] Neo-slave narratives include such diverse works as Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings (1979) and The President's Daughter (1994), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), J. California Cooper's Family (1992) and In Search of Satisfaction (1994), Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1994), Louise Meriwether's Fragments of the Ark (1994), Fred D'Aguiar's The Longest Memory (1994), Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child (1995), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003), Valerie Mason-John’s Borrowed Body (2005), and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) to name only a few.
http://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCoQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.geneseo.edu%2Fwebfm_send%2F5098&ei=Eo2FVcOxAunW7QbZl4H4BQ&usg=AFQjCNF74NkNzIsDRXG739aVNpyaHKGCFw&sig2=I8dMhySJYZNsOOPOisHIOw