Wole Soyinka
and tropes – and even entire passages – that have appeared in previous
essays.
Against the background of this general profile of the totality of
Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings, this chapter identifies and ex-
plores three phases of the author’s critical thought, but not as completely
distinct or disconnected formations. Rather, the purpose in adopting
this approach is to highlight an aspect of this body of the Nigerian au-
thor’s writings that has generally been ignored. This is the fact that there
is, even within the similarities and and continuities between the three
phases, a discernible evolution, a process of maturation in Soyinka’s crit-
ical thought that is important to delineate since this has considerable
value for historically grounded and contextual readings of Soyinka’s
works in particular and, more generally, his entire career. It is perhaps
useful to give a brief outline of each of these three phases before ex-
ploring each one in fairly detailed readings of the essays and books that
correspond to each particular phase.
The first phase begins with the vigorously articulated anti-N ́egritudism
of Soyinka’s early critical essays and ends with our author’s most im-
portant essay on tragedy and art, “The Fourth Stage.” The ferocious
assault in most of these early essays on what our author deems the self-
exoticization and provincialism of much of the “new” literature of post-
independent Africa marks this phase decisively as that of a “returnee”
whose sojourn in Europe at a formative stage in his early career had
predisposed to the promotion of an as yet unexamined cosmopolitanism
and universalism. “Cosmopolitanism” here means, concretely, a reinven-
tion of many of the characteristic themes and attitudes of the Western
post-romantic, post-realist cultural and aesthetic avant-garde, especially
in the light of their startling and invigorating prefigurations in many pre-
colonial African expressive traditions and representational idioms. This
phase is the most combative, the most self-confidently revolutionary of
the three phases of Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings, even if the
nature and scope of the “revolution” would only very gradually be
thought through in the subsequent phases.
The second phase corresponds to the period inaugurated by the “an-
nunciation” that we have identified earlier in the Preface toMyth, Liter-
ature and the African World. If the neo-N ́egritudism of this phase is no less
assertively and combatively articulated as the anti-N ́egritudism of the
first phase, it remains true that Soyinka isdefensivelycombative in this
second phase in a manner that he was not, and could not have been,
in the first phase. This is because it is an embattled theorist, critic and