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The IUP Journal of English Studies :
New Trends in Postmodern Tiv Comedy and Comic Forms in a Technologized Digiperformance
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Traditional Tiv comedy and comic forms flaunt their cultural and artistic properties based on the spatial bursts of sociocultural energy, itself reliant on worldviews, interests, thoughts, and values qualitative and quantitative to traditional components of life and metaphysics. The dictates of time and development and the ascendency of western inspired character of technological and scientific dynamics of social, economic, and political orientation and postmodern existence have tended to change the pattern and character of traditional information and entertainment generation and dissemination from its oral formation and age-old tradition of handing down materials and experience through elders from generation to generation and knowledge and wisdom from elders to a digital form which co-habituates the old and the modern to a synergy, opens up traditional cultures, and links up extreme communities to a large global space. Much as the phenomenon is creating plural identities and all sorts of contrary alien values, it has forged unifying properties and produced endless possibilities and potentialities for the traditional oral art forms, most of which were threatened to extinction. The paper explores and illuminates Tiv comedy and comic forms as they hybridize in what the writer terms a technologized digiperformance. The paper examines the changing trend in Tiv comedy and comic forms in its manifestations in the digital technology, in its new artistic secondary production, commoditization and consumption, and in its new shape capable of achieving wider patronage, cultural and cross-cultural unity, preservation, academic discourse, and national and global development.

 
 
 

The notion of postmodernism, which developed in the 1970s, suggests a pattern of thinking, even non-thinking, than a historical epoch. Postmodernism defies the act of analyses, dismisses logic and cause-and-effect determinism, and replaces them with random associations, representations, and reflections—reflections that are self-reflections or are homage-paying reflections to past texts and models. Where modernism repudiates the past, the approach of postmodernism embraces it and quotes and recycles it. The approach of postmodernism is about itself, a deconstructed self or art to usher in the desired reflections of that self, being self-referential, deeply imbued with its own critique, its metaphors, similes, and personifications, as it parodies itself, creates collage and pastiche, sending us back and forth in amusement, or irritation, upon our thoughts and history (Cohen 1994, 281-285).

Armed with the technique of experimentation, in like manner as our scientists and media space operators of newer technology, postmodern artists agglomerate fragments in geographical and historical discontinuity of observable materials, and like the scientists, celebrate the ‘randomness of arbitrary juxtaposition’ which is intermixed with commercials, promos, newsbreaks, announcements, station identifications, and old film clips.

 
 
 

English Studies Journal, Secondary production, Commoditization, Consumption, New Trends, Postmodern Tiv Comedy, Comic Forms, Technologized , Digiperformance.