Notes to pages–
Press,. See also Bennetta Jules-Rosette,Black Paris: the African Writer’s
Landscape, Urbana: University of Illinois Press,.
These abstract syntheses between Europe and Africa, considered as “racial”
civilizations, are given their fullest elaboration in Senghor’s writings. See, in
particular, the essays “Towards a New African-Inspired Humanism,” “The
Struggle for N ́egritude” and “Reformed N ́egritude” in hisProse and Poetry,
selected and translated by John Reed and Clive Wake, London: Oxford
University Press,.
The most notorious of such attacks on Soyinka is of course that of Chinweizu,
Jemie and Madubuike in theirTowards the Decolonization of African Literature,
Washington, DC: Howard University Press,.
The fullest elaboration of the construct or concept-metaphor of thephar-
makonin Derrida’s writings is to be found in hisDissemination, University of
Chicago Press,.
For a collection of essays which express this pessimism in ways somewhat
similar to Soyinka’s sentiments in “The Writer in a Modern African State”
see R.H. Crossman (ed.),The God That Failed, New York: Harper,.
Biodun Jeyifo, “Wole Soyinka and the Tropes of Disalienation,”Art, Dialogue
and Outrage, Ibadan: New Horn Press,.
For one of the most authoritative scholarly studies of the Symbolists,
see Anna Balakian,The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal, New York
University Press,.
This view is given an extended exploration in Florence Stratton’s “Periodic
Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing,”Research in
African Literatures,.(Spring),–.
Other notable bodies of critical writings from the period which have become
influential, indeed almost canonical as the standard bearers of progres-
sive literary-critical discourse in postcolonial African literature are Chinua
Achebe,Morning Yet on Creation Day, Garden City, NY: Doubleday,and
Ngugi wa Thiong’o,Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature,
Culture and Politics, New York: Hill,.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (translated by Charles Lam
Markmann) London: Pluto Press,, Chapter, “The Fact of Blackness,”
especially–.
I have briefly explored Soyinka’s location in the tradition of Pan-African
thinkers and pundits of an African order of knowledge of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in my Introductory essay to Biodun Jeyifo (ed.),
Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, Jackson, MI: University
Press of Mississippi,. See also J. Ayo Langley (ed.),Ideologies of Liberation
in Black Africa,–, London: Rex Collings,.
Joel Adedeji, “Aesthetics of Soyinka’s Theatre” in Dapo Adelugba (ed.),Before
Our Very Eyes,–, and Ketu Katrak,Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A
Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice, Westport, CO: Greenwood Press,.
M.H. Abrams,Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature, New York: Norton,.