WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

(Romina) #1

 Notes to pages–


African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, New York: Oxford
University Press,,–.
Gibbs,Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka. Significantly, the only play of Soyinka
to have received publication as a textbeforeany stage performance of it is
Death and the King’s Horseman.
Among Soyinka’s more notable acting credits are his playing of Forest Head
in his own staging ofA Dance of the Forestsfor the Nigerian Independence
celebrations in; his playing of Kongi in the filming ofKongi’s Harvest
in; and his playing of the role of Patrice Lumumba in Paris in a
French-language version of Conor Cruise O’Brien’sMurderous Angelsin
.
“Interview with John Agetua,” in Biodun Jeyifo (ed.),Conversations with Wole
Soyinka, Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi,,–.
 See Immanuel Wallerstein,Africa and the Politics of Unity: An Analysis of a
Contemporary Social Movement, New York: Vintage Books,.
 See Femi Osofisan, “Wole Soyinka and a Living Dramatist: A Playwright’s
Encounter with Soyinka’s Drama,” in Maja-Pearce (ed.),Wole Soyinka: An
Appraisal.
 Annemarie Heywood, “The Fox’s Dance: the Staging of Soyinka’s Plays,”
in Gibbs,Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka.
 Eldred Jones,The Writings of Wole Soyinka, London: Heinemann,; Gerald
Moore,Wole Soyinka, London: Evans,; Adrian Roscoe,Mother Is Gold: A
Study of West African Literature, Cambridge University Press,.
 In a private conversation with the author of this study.
I owe this perception of echoes of the John the Baptist-Salome story to Abiola
Irele. This resonance is apparently so obvious that to date, it has simply gone
unremarked in all critical and scholarly commentary onKongi’s Harvest.
 Michel Foucault,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press,, especially Part Three, “Practice, Knowledge and Power”;
Vaclav Havel,The Power of the Powerless, John Keane (ed.), Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe,.
For a study of this aspect of Genet’s dramaturgy, see Laura Oswald,Jean
Genet and the Semiotics of Performance, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University
Press,.
Mary David,Wole Soyinka: A Quest for Renewal, Madras, India: B.I. Publica-
tions,.
Among these are Florence Stratton, “Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous
Trope in African Men’s Writing,” Molara Ogundipe, “The Representation
of Women: the Example of Soyinka’sAk ́e,” in Molara Ogundipe-Leslie,
Re-creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations, Trenton, NJ:
Africa World Press,; and Carole Boyce Davis, “Maidens, Mistresses
and Matrons: Feminine Images in Selected Soyinka Works,” inNgambika:
Studies of Women in African Literature, Ann Adams Graves and Carole Boyce
Davis (eds), Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press,.

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