ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the intellectual context of the independence era, to show how the National Ballet and its repertoire were created as a product of a postcolonial Black Atlantic consciousness. It discusses the power of historical narratives like the Sunjata Epic ballet in the construction of modernity, by specifically outlining how the political use of the piece from independence to today has acted as a catalyst for certain postcolonial issues in Africa. The chapter shows how the Sunjata became a cultural product still relevant 50 years after Mali's independence. It analyses the staging of the epic by the National Ballet of Mali as a cultural product pertaining to the constitution of the national historical narrative of postcolonial Mali. The successive transformation of the epic, from oral tradition into written text, recorded songs and then to choreographical performance within the context of African and world history allows its theorisation at the crossroads of world history and world literature.
