Wole Soyinka
coexistent and coeval “worlds” of the ancestors and the past, of living
generations and the present, and of unborn generations and the future.
Soyinka criticism has in the main read this formulation as appertaining
only to the world of Yoruba cosmology, or at best and by extension,
the “African world,” the “Black world.” It is time to go with Soyinka’s
most ambitious and challenging works likeA Dance of the Forests,The Road,
Madmen and Specialists,Death and the King’s Horseman,A Shuttle in the Crypt,
The Bacchae of Euripides,Isara, andOutsidersand read them complexly
and comparatively as appertaining both to Africa and the developing
world and the whole of humanity. This radical hermeneutic act can be
helped if we secularize and historicize the significations of these “worlds”:
the ancestors, living generations and unborn denizens of the world are
co-extensive in the ways that the defeats, victories, energies and capac-
ities of the precolonial and colonial pasts are still residually with us in
the postcolonial present and future, just as “structures of feeling” of the
epochs of precapitalism and capitalism still haunt the present of late
capitalism, with important intimations and portents for our future post-
capitalist world.