Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings polemicist that we encounter in this phase. And in this connection, not
the least of his objects of attack here are precisely the Western modernist
and avant-garde cultural and literary currents that Soyinka had more or
less embraced in the first phase. Moreover, race being a central subject
of the discourse in this phase, the historic experiences of slavery, colo-
nialism and epistemic racism enter into Soyinka’s critical discourse in
this phase and not in the first phase.
If the third phase – corresponding to the essays and writings of the late
s ands – return us to the cosmopolitanism of the first phase,
it is a neo-cosmopolitanism quite unlike the unexamined and rather
abstractly pessimistic universalism of the first phase. Taking our cue from
the title of one of the most significant essays in this third phase, “Climates
of Art,” the “climates” of culture and the arts in diverse regions of the
contemporary world are the main objects of analysis and speculation
in the discourses of this phase. Even the thematics of “race” and of the
elaboration of a “Black world” which includes both the continent and
the Diasporas, both of which are dominant topics in the writings of the
second phase, are redefined in this third phase in more intellectually
rigorous and more ideologically nuanced ways.
Before moving to an elaboration of the anti-N ́egritudist cosmopoli-
tanism of the first phase of Soyinka’s critical prose, a word of clarification
is perhaps necessary on the usefulness of dividing his theoretical writings
into phases, especially into a quasi-Hegelian triadic movement of “be-
coming.” Famously, Fanon divided the writings of all colonized societies
seeking to end their colonization and move into another, more liberated
epoch of history into this same triadic movement, this in his greatest
theoretical work,The Wretched of the Earth.The three phases in Fanon’s
schema – which have been widely and most uncritically applied to the
writings of virtually all formerly colonized groups and societies – are: a
first phase of a derivative, imitative literature based on barely assimilated
models and influences from the colonizers; a second phase of more or less
extreme nativist reaction to, and in many cases rejection of, all models
and influences from the colonizers; and a final phase of what Fanon calls a
“fighting” literature, a people’s literature, a revolutionary literature. It is
instructive that while in terms of the movement of modern, postcolonial
African literatures the works of Soyinka and his generation collectively
straddle Fanon’s second and third phases, Soyinka’s own critical thought,
as the outline given above indicates, defies any direct and uncomplicated
assimilation into the schema of Fanon’s three phases. Indeed, it would
seem that the motive force of the very first phase of the Nigerian author’s