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Wole Soyinka's Yoruba Tragedy: Performing Politics

Astrid Van Weyenberg

in African Athena: New Agendas

This chapter discusses Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, It explores, first of all, how Soyinka draws on Yoruba mythology and cosmology to emphasise the revolutionary ... More

This chapter discusses Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, It explores, first of all, how Soyinka draws on Yoruba mythology and cosmology to emphasise the revolutionary potential of ritual sacrifice. Then, the focus shifts to the politics that the adaptation performs through its ambiguous relation with the Euripedean pre‐text, a relation that is characterised by a dual emphasis on correspondence and difference. In the final part, the cultural politics at play in Soyinka's refiguration of Dionysus and in his theory of ‘Yoruba tragedy’ is considered in relation to Martin Bernal's Black Athena project. The primary intention is to demonstrate how Soyinka does with ‘tragedy’ what Bernal does with ‘Greece’: challenging its conventional definition and destabilising the Eurocentrism that has traditionally inhibited it.Less

Blood on the Leaves, Blood at the Root: Ritual Carriers and Sacrificial Crises of Transition in Yoknapatawpha and Oyo

Keith Cartwright

in Global Faulkner

This chapter presents a comparative study of Faulkner and Wole Soyinka. By drawing global South connections between Mississippi and Nigeria, it maps Yoknapatawpha’s local racialized violence in ... More

This chapter presents a comparative study of Faulkner and Wole Soyinka. By drawing global South connections between Mississippi and Nigeria, it maps Yoknapatawpha’s local racialized violence in stories such as “Red Leaves,” “That Evening Sun,” and “Delta Autumn” onto a larger transnational grid of ethnic economies shared by Soyinka’s Africa. The chapter analyzes the “carriers” of ritual cleansings (often African American or Native American characters in Faulkner) and the “medicinal models” of healing in the fiction of Faulkner and Soyinka, who move their readers to “cathartic responsibility” by triggering a startling recognition of the reader’s own participation in repeating the violence.Less

Sacrifice, Ritual, and Canonical Violence in the British/African Drama of T. S. Eliot, Caryl Churchill, and Wole Soyinka

Simon Lewis

in British and African Literature in Transnational Context

This chapter tries to portray that the British drama's canon illustrates the stubborn “otherness” of Africa, permitting the repetition of stereotypical, historically incurious representations of ... More

This chapter tries to portray that the British drama's canon illustrates the stubborn “otherness” of Africa, permitting the repetition of stereotypical, historically incurious representations of Africa by British dramatists—whether conservative or progressive—while still holding Anglophone African writers at arm's length. The chapter scrutinizes three plays: The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot, Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka, and Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill. All these novels re-create a moment in colonial history as per the author's modern point of view.Less

From the Court to the National: The Theatrical Legacy of Gilbert Murray's Bacchae *

Fiona Macintosh

in Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics

This chapter reviews Murray's involvement with the theatre. It situates his translations in the performance traditions of early 20th-century England and also in a wider context, including that of the ... More

This chapter reviews Murray's involvement with the theatre. It situates his translations in the performance traditions of early 20th-century England and also in a wider context, including that of the Salvation Army and the influence of Nietzsche. The chapter ends by exploring the influence of Murray's translations on the reworking of Greek tragic plots by the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka.Less

Mendele's Mare and Soyinka's Interpreters

in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

This chapter compares two novels: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh's (Mendele Moykher-Sforim) Di Klyatshe and Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters. Comprised of twenty-four chapters, Di Klyatshe parodies haskole ... More

This chapter compares two novels: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh's (Mendele Moykher-Sforim) Di Klyatshe and Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters. Comprised of twenty-four chapters, Di Klyatshe parodies haskole by telling the story of Yisrolik, a would-be university student who rescues—in his dream—a mare from a band of juvenile delinquents. In this fiction, Abramovitsh shows the explicit connection between culture and power, placing the mare at the center of an unequal showdown between the putative maskil and the imperial state. Both Di Klyatshe and The Interpreters highlight the collapse of previous distinctions between tradition and modernity. The Interpreters stresses the continuity between tradition and modernity, the paradoxical oldness of independent Nigeria.Less

Wole Soyinka and Hugh MacDiarmid: The Violence and Virtues of Nations

Alan Riach

in Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives

This chapter explores the cultural critic offering an assessment that must be especially ready to historicise the work of Hugh MacDiarmid and Wole Soyinka, and to see the different roles their ... More

This chapter explores the cultural critic offering an assessment that must be especially ready to historicise the work of Hugh MacDiarmid and Wole Soyinka, and to see the different roles their nations have played historically, beginning from the understanding that not all nations are the same or fulfil the same function. MacDiarmid based his literary effort on the validity of national identity. His conviction, far more than any comparable or contemporary figure, was that in Scotland, nationality was a vital consideration in the development of the totality of cultural production and the concurrent well-being of people generally. The differences between the national identities of Nigeria and Scotland show amply how useless any single theory of nationalism is, unless it describes specific historical circumstances. The natural concerns and responsibilities that come with place and connection are what Soyinka's words remind his readers of.Less

The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison

Tessa Roynon

in African Athena: New Agendas

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison's engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature ... More

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison's engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature of novels she published both before and after the appearance of Bernal's Black Athena in 1987. It examines key vignettes in Sula, The Bluest Eye and Paradise, showing that though repeated engagement with Ovid's Metamorphoses the author asserts the confluence of African, Greek, and Roman cultures. Exploring her interest in the Nag Hammadi texts; in African‐American strategic appropriations of a performed ‘Egyptianness’; in Aesop; in the Antiquities collections at the Louvre; and in the work of other ‘diasporic classicists’ such as Wole Soyinka, it concludes that the Morrisonian oeuvre forms a significant contribution to recent reconceptualization of classical culture, and of the implications of this for modernity.Less

From Author–God to Textual Communion

Eleftheria Ioannidou

in Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970-2005

The fourth chapter discusses hybrid plays that unsettle the distinction between translation and adaptation. The chapter relates this mode of rewriting to the idea of the death of the Author, coined ... More

The fourth chapter discusses hybrid plays that unsettle the distinction between translation and adaptation. The chapter relates this mode of rewriting to the idea of the death of the Author, coined by Roland Barthes in the late 1960s. Ted Hughes’s Alcestis and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles adapt the figure of Heracles to contemplate the demise of the male hero via a translational practice that embodies the demise of the male Author. In Brendan Kennelly’s versions of Greek tragedy, the same practice is adopted to voice the silenced female stories. In Wole Soyinka’s postcolonial adaptation The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, the end of the authorial patriarchy entails the cultural fluidity of the classical canon.Less

America, Africa, and Classical Traditions

Tessa Roynon

in Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture

This chapter examines Morrison's challenge to the fabricated conception of classicism as a ‘pure’ boy of culture, as a European pedigree on which so many aspects of dominant American identity depend. ... More

This chapter examines Morrison's challenge to the fabricated conception of classicism as a ‘pure’ boy of culture, as a European pedigree on which so many aspects of dominant American identity depend. It demonstrates the novelist's interest in the historical connectedness of Africa (both North and West) with Ancient Greece and Rome. It explores her affinities with Martin Bernal, Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, and Wole Soyinka; her anthologizing of African literature in the 1970s; her use of Egyptian traditions and of the Gnostic gospels in the Nag Hammadi library; her revisionary deployment of Ovid's Metamorphoses to restore Africa to both the classical tradition and to the American structures that depend on that tradition; and her adaptations of Aesop's fables. The key novels discussed her are Sula, Paradise, and Jazz.Less

Introduction

Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon

in African Athena: New Agendas

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison’s engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature ... More

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison’s engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature of novels she published both before and after the appearance of Bernal’s Black Athena in 1987. It examines key vignettes in Sula, The Bluest Eye and Paradise, showing that though repeated engagement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses the author asserts the confluence of African, Greek, and Roman cultures. Exploring her interest in the Nag Hammadi texts; in African-American strategic appropriations of a performed ‘Egyptianness’; in Aesop; in the Antiquities collections at the Louvre; and in the work of other ‘diasporic classicists’ such as Wole Soyinka, it concludes that the Morrisonian oeuvre forms a significant contribution to recent reconceptualization of classical culture, and of the implications of this for modernity.Less