Notes to pages–
the Gods of Equity,” two of the three essays inThe Burden of Memory, the Muse
of Forgiveness.
For one essay which insightfully explores the place of verse in Soyinka’s
plays, see Alain S ́everac, “The Verse of Soyinka’s Plays:A Dance of the Forests,”
Research in African Literatures,vol.,no.(),–. For a useful, though
intellectually tendentious and aesthetically conservative summary of the
positions of the accusers and defenders of Soyinka on the charge of the
“difficulty” of his poetry, see James Booth, “Myth, Metaphor and Syntax in
Soyinka’s Poetry,”Research in African Literatures,vol.,no.(Spring),
–.
See among others Jurgen Habermas,The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures, (Translated by Fredric Lawrence), Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press,.
As quoted by Fraser,West African Poetry: A Critical History,.
“Climates of Art” in Soyinka,Art, Dialogue and Outrage.
On the place of the “ijuba” in traditional precolonial Yoruba performance,
see Joel Adedeji in “‘Alarinjo’: the Traditional Yoruba Traveling Theatre,”
in Oyin Ogunba and Abiola Irele (eds.),Theatre in Africa, especially–.
Fanon,The Wretched of the Earth, especially the chapter, “On National
Culture,”–.
The notion of a “classical” or originary N ́egritude, as well as the corol-
lary concept of a “revisionary” N ́egritude are Senghor’s. See essays desig-
nated to these two formations of N ́egritude inL.S. Senghor: Prose and Poetry,
John Reed and Clive Wake (translators and editors), Heinemann Educa-
tional Books,. For authoritative English-language articles on N ́egritude
see Abiola Irele “What Is N ́egritude?” and “N ́egritude and the African
Personality” in hisThe African Experience in Literature and Ideology,–,
–.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in hisIlluminations:
Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Schocken Books,
.
These are explored by Jacques Derrida in his “Racism’s Last Word,” in H.L.
Gates, Jr. (ed.),‘Race,’ Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press,.
For a recent example of the postmodernist book-length discourse of non-
racialism, see Paul Gilroy,Against Race, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press,.
Nadine Gordimer, quoting Maxim Gorky, has the following sentence as one
of the two epigraphs to her novel,The Late Bourgeois World: “The madness of
the brave is the wisdom of life.”
Among the most surprising defenders of Abacha and his regime were
erstwhile highly respected intellectual champions of democracy like the
economist, Sam Aluko and the journalist Peter Enahoro (“Peter Pan”).
The list includes Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
Senator Carole Moseley Braun and Honorable Louis Farrakhan of the
Nation of Islam.