Speaking Our Selves brings together eight remarkable plays by women writers from the under-represented African countries of Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Mali, Burundi, Benin, and Sudan, plus a play by award-winning Ugandan playwright and volume coeditor Asiimwe Kawe. Four of the plays are translated into English from Kiswahili, French, or Kirundi and French, while most of the plays preserve African indigenous languages, including Runyankore, Lusoga, Mina, Fon, Bambara, Luganda, Kiswahili, and Kirundi. Although the plays are united in presenting women as central figures who own their voices, they also represent a rich diversity of story-telling. Each unique dramaturgy is rooted in African forms of story-telling that occasionally merge with recognizable Western forms to create hybrid, dramatic forms. These hybrid methods emphasize the striking ways in which African women writers continue to experiment with form, moving beyond Western-influenced dramaturgy if and when it jeopardizes their authentic ways of artistic expression and creation through language, movement, and music, centered in African Cosmology.

The plays within Speaking Our Selves confront a range of ideas and issues, including women embracing the potential of agency in often contested subject positions; confronting their historical object positions in worlds of devastating patriarchal authority; resisting toxic masculinity and persistent, oppressive binaries of gender roles; finding power in communities of women; women increasing their acumen in financial, business, and economic spheres; facing tensions between traditional religious tenets and efforts toward secularization; living with perpetual acts of violence toward their bodies; and the rising mental health issues among girls and women across the continent. Readers and audiences are challenged by these plays not to be passive witnesses by observing from safe vantage points, but rather to be active participants in the stories being told.

Asiimwe Deborah Kawe is Producing Artistic Director for the Tebere Arts Foundation and Artistic Director of the Kampala International Theatre Festival.
Robert H. Vorlicky, most recently Visiting Professor of Theater at New York University Abu Dhabi, the initial Director of the Honors Program, and a former Director of Theatre Studies in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Drama.