Playing for Life Performance in Africa in the Age of AIDS

Playing for Life is a survey of African performance that uses the focal lens of AIDS performances to examine performance more generally on the African continent. The aim of Playing for Life is threefold. First, the work provides an introduction to the study of Africa through performance suitable for undergraduate students. Second, it supplies a sampling of Africa's rich performative resources. And third, it shows how Africans are working to harness the energy of performance to help solve the most terrible of contemporary problems, the AIDS pandemic.

This book focuses chiefly on the AIDS epidemic/AIDS performances in two African countries, South Africa and Mali. The choice is reflective of a need to provide at least two different case views of African performance and African performative response to the AIDS crisis. The countries, so divergent from one another by most social indicators—economy, religion, geography and climate, colonial history, pre-colonial history, and nature and severity of the AIDS epidemic—offer excellent contrasts from one another, making them ideal selections for this work.