WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

 Wole Soyinka

Euro-American cultural and racial attitudes regarding the non-Western
world. And as we have observed earlier, a sort of deliberate annunciation
of this shift is indeed contained in the Preface toMyth, Literature and the
African World, the book of essays intended to launch this project of “the
self-apprehension of a race”:

From a well-publicized position as an anti-N ́egritudinist (if only one knew in
advance what would make one statement more memorable that the next!) it has
been with an increasing sense of alarm and even betrayal that we have watched
our position distorted and exploited to embrace a “sophisticated” school of
thought which (for ideological reasons) actually repudiates the existence of an
African world! Both in cultural and political publications, and at such encoun-
ters as the UNESCO Conference on the Influence of Colonialism on African
Culture, Dar es Salaam,theth Pan-African Congress, Dar es Salaam
, the pre-Colloque of the Black Arts Festival, Dakar, etc., etc...we
black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch
of colonization – this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and
conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the
apprehension oftheirworld andtheirhistory,theirsocial neuroses andtheirvalue
systems. It is time, clearly, to respond to this new threat, each in his own field
(MLAW, ix–x)

In order to apprehend fully the terms which frame this shift in racial
discourse in Soyinka’s critical prose, it is important to note another point
of radical departure from the concerns and attitudes of the early essays
that the “middle period” essays manifest. This pertains to the general
question of the literary phenomenon in Africa and in the world at large
at the present time. For where Soyinka in the early essays had focused al-
most exclusively on writers and writing, the “middle period” essays focus
sharply on critics and criticism, on what the Nigerian author repeatedly
designates the “sociology of the critic.” In other words, where the ear-
lier essays had projected literature and literary criticism as more or less
an autonomous discourse, there is in the essays of thes and early
s a strong sense of literary criticism and literature asonecomposite
discourse in a vast force field of other discourses: professional and ideo-
logical discourses; discourses of the colonizers and those of the colonized;
discourses based on class, on nationality and ethnicity, and on race. This
new emphasis on the discursive contexts of the production and reception
of literature involves diverse but related themes: the teaching of literature
in the institutional context of colleges and universities and the attendant
politics of pedagogy; the politics of language choice and the formation of
reading publics in Africa; the emergence of the writings of professional