African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 626
essential nature and role of literature. There are perhaps special problems about how to
delimit literature when it is oral and thus not differentiated through the demarcating
symbol of writing, perhaps with no unambiguous divide between lengthy performed
genres at one end and, at the other, minor forms of verbal art, short textual nodes, or
everyday but arguably poetic salutations, witticisms, or anecdotes. But this issue itself is
now being linked into the increasing recognition of the ideological, situational, and
relative nature of the borders that are or have been drawn around the term literature more
generally.
The oral, or performed, qualities of much African literature can also invoke
challenging issues and a range of possible perspectives. There are questions, for example,
about the processes of composition, “communicative events,” or the mechanisms for
dissemination and representation. By now many theorists are sensitive to the multiplicity
rather than uniformity of the “oral”: a complex and differentiated cluster of features,
realized differently in different contexts and genres and interacting differentially with
other media. The arts and settings of performance also raise questions for debate. How
far, for example, is a prime focus on the lead performer or on the words (as in many
traditional literary approaches) realistic in the face of performance features like music,
dance, auditory, and vocal qualities, kinesic features, visual aspects, multivocality,
communicative setting, multiple performers/participants, or the active role of audiences?
Are written transcriptions and translations still acceptable for representing these
performance features, given the increasing availability of other media besides the written
word? Does the concept of “performance literature” have implications for literary theory
more generally (see Gerstle and Hermans 2000–)? Many scholars are currently turning
towards more intensive investigation and debate about the active, multidimensional and
nonneutral processes by which literary forms—written as well as oral—are both
produced and studied.
New developments in information technology raise further issues, extending scholars’
vision beyond written or transcribed words-on-a-page to other media of expression and
leading to an increasing appreciation of the “materiality” of texts. There are new
questions too about the nature of “text.” Once seen as something fixed, bounded, and
stable, the experience of “soft” computer text has uncovered issues about malleability,
relativity, and nonboundedness (issues that will actually cause little surprise to those
acquainted with oral literature).
These varied questions provide a meeting point between the kinds of issues long of
interest to students of oral literatures and those now treated in, for example, media
studies, literary theory, performance studies, or popular culture. The informed study of
African oral literatures has much not just to learn from but also to contribute to the
comparative international study of literature in the widest sense of that term, not least in
its insight into the significance of processual, multimodal, and performance dimensions,
the problematics of textuality, and the role of active—and heterogeneous—participants.
Indeed, it could be claimed that some recent transdisciplinary developments are merely
ways in which other academics are now beginning to catch up with established insights in
the study of African oral literature and performed arts.
Conclusion