Postcolonial Identity In Wole Soyinka

Soyinka's representation of postcolonial African identity is re-examined in the light of his major plays, novels and poetry to show how this writer's idiom of cultural authenticity both embraces hybridity and defines itself as specific and particular. For Soyinka, such authenticity involves recovering tradition and inserting it in postcolonial modernity to facilitate transformative moral and political justice. The past can be both our enabling future and our nemesis. In a distinctive approach grounded in cultural studies, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka locates the artist's intellectual and political concerns within the broader field of postcolonial cultural theory, arguing that, although ostensibly distant from mainstream theory, Soyinka focuses on fundamental questions concerning international culture and political identity formations - the relationship between myth and history / tradition and modernity, and the unresolved tension between power as a force for good or evil. Soyinka's treatment of the relationship between individual selfhood and the various framing social and collective identities, so the book argues, is yet another aspect linking his work to the broader intellectual currents of today. Thus, Soyinka's vision is seen as central to contemporary efforts to grasp the nature of modernity. His works conceptualize identity in ways that promote and modify national perceptions of 'Africanness', rescuing them from the colonial and neocolonial logic of cultural denigration in a manner that fully acknowledges the cosmopolitan and global contexts of African postcolonial formation. Overall, what emerges from the present study is the conviction that, in Soyinka's work, it is the capacity to assume personal and collective agency and the particular choices made by particular subjects at given historical moments that determine the trajectory of change and ultimately the nature of postcolonial existence itself. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka is a major and imaginative contribution to the study of Wole Soyinka, African literature, and postcolonial cultural theory and one in which writing and creativity stand in fruitful symbiosis with the critical sense. It should appeal to Soyinka scholars, to students of African literature, and to anyone interested in postcolonial and cultural theory.

Biodun Jeyifo examines the connections between the innovative and influential writings of Wole Soyinka and his radical political activism. Jeyifo carries out detailed analyses of Soyinka's most ambitious works, relating them to the controversies generated by Soyinka's use of literature and theatre for radical political purposes. He gives a fascinating account of the profound but paradoxical affinities and misgivings Soyinka has felt about the significance of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Jeyifo also explores Soyinka's works with regard to the impact on his artistic sensibilities of the pervasiveness of representational ambiguity and linguistic exuberance in Yoruba culture. The analyses and evaluations of this study are presented in the context of Soyinka's sustained engagement with the violence of collective experience in post-independence, postcolonial Africa and the developing world. No existing study of Soyinka's works and career has attempted such a systematic investigation of their complex relationship to politics.

Post Colonial Identities revisits issues regarding the newer literature within the expansive African heritage of diverse regional and national groupings. It is poised at substantiating the uniformity of Africa in terms of literary and cultural movements, and lending some inter-disciplinary insights on the whole body of literature through twentieth century history.

Making a break with conventional wisdom in post-colonial discourse, this book explores contemporary African identities in transition. The contributors look at the colonial legacy and how colonial identities are being reconstructed in the face of deepening social inequality across the continent.

This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, grade: 1.0, Martin Luther University (Deutsche Sprache und Literatur), course: Introduction to Postcolonial Theory, Literature, and Film, language: English, abstract: Postcolonial studies aim at stripping away conventional thoughts and examine what kind of identity emerges in postcolonial subject. The first problem when I set out to work on postcolonial literatures is to confirm its scope. This word scope that I put forward here can be explained as follows, on the one hand, postcolonial literature is apparently vague and general. It’s such a multinational and multicultural case that it is hard to define which country falls under the rubric. Except what we always mentioned as “postcolonial countries” such as Nigeria, India and Pakistan, some writers include also countries like Canada, Ireland and Australia. So when we read the literatures about postcolonial, it is apparent for us to discover, that they include two parts, on the one hand, it is based on the dominant or colonizer society, on the other hand, it talks also about the dominated or colonized society. On the other hand, there are a large number of relevant themes or aspects around the topic postcolonialism: migration, race, gender, resistance, slavery and so on. Trying to cover all the countries and aspects in one essay seems not so specific. In my essay, I will focus on the question “Who am I ?”. This kind of doubt about one’s identity is a “derivative product” of colonialism and a very important topic in postcolonial world. When we read literatures, we are able to seek out, what the indigenous voice want to express, how should the indigenous people see themselves, once their place and identity were forced to change? Is the dual identity always ambivalent? These questions are what I’m going to explain hereinafter.

The Present Book Is An Attempt To Analyse Some Of The Outstanding Post-Colonial Writers Like Arundhati Roy (Booker Prize Winner 1997), Vikram Chandra (Commonwealth Prize Winner 1997), Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize Winner), Margaret Atwood (Booker Prize Winner 2000), Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, Keki N. Daruwalla, Kamala Das, Shiv K. Kumar, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Ruskin Bond (All Sahitya Akademi Award Winners) In The Light Of Post-Colonial Theory. Apart From Analysing Individual Authors, An Attempt Has Also Been Made To Show The Trends In Post-Colonial Poetry, Indian English Fiction, Orissan Contribution To Post-Colonial Indian English Literature And Above All, Post-Colonial English Studies In India.

At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.