Cheela Chilala

The Cultural Factor in the Semiotics of Contemporary African Drama: an Analysis of Four African Plays Cheela Chilala

This book is based on a study of the influence of culture on the semiotics of contemporary African drama - semiotics being the study of signs, which in this book includes both verbal and non-verbal signs. In this regard, even silence can be as much a sign as noise, and stillness as much as movement; inaction as much as action. Cultural factors play a critical role in the production and interpretation of sign-vehicles in a dramatic text because some signs are culture-specific. The book proceeds from the premise that African dramatists are influenced by their culture when writing plays and that readers of the African play cannot ignore the writer?s cultural orientation if they are to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of the text. A fair degree of understanding of the writer?s cultural background is therefore critical to textual interpretation. Hence the behaviour of signs in the literary cultural context is an important preoccupation of the work. The book's findings are based on a semiotic as opposed to a hermeneutic analysis of four African dramatic texts ? The Black Mamba (Kasoma), Nothing but the Truth (Kani), The Dilemma of a Ghost (Aidoo) and The Black Hermit (Ngugi).