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Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture
Nineteen essays discuss African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics
305 pages, Hardcover
First published May 3, 1994
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About the author
Wole Soyinka
208 books1,262 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and... poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian (and African at large) governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the "NADECO Route". Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation.
In Nigeria, Soyinka was a Professor of Comparative literature (1975 to 1999) at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ifẹ̀. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. While in the United States, he first taught at Cornell University as Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts from 1988 to 1991 and then at Emory University, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has served as scholar-in-residence at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale, and was also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.
In December 2017, Soyinka was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in the "Special Prize" category, awarded to someone who has "contributed to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples".
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and... poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian (and African at large) governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the "NADECO Route". Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation.
In Nigeria, Soyinka was a Professor of Comparative literature (1975 to 1999) at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ifẹ̀. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. While in the United States, he first taught at Cornell University as Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts from 1988 to 1991 and then at Emory University, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has served as scholar-in-residence at New York University's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale, and was also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.
In December 2017, Soyinka was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in the "Special Prize" category, awarded to someone who has "contributed to the realization of cultural events that promote understanding and the exchange of knowledge between peoples".
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 26, 2011
Okay, I read earnestly all the way to page 127, but this literary criticism is still all beyond me. Many references to works I've not only not read, but never heard of. Maybe I'll come back to this after I've read a lot more of the literature. I did get some names for further reading: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Robert Serumaga (Uganda), Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), Yambo Ouloguem (Mali), Camara Leye (Guinea), Mongo Beti (Cameroon), Amos Tutuola (Nigeria), William Conton (Sierra Leone), Lewis Nkosi (South Africa), Peter Abrahams (South Africa), Alex La Guma (South Africa).
Also, there was one passage that really spoke to me, on page 97, in The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies:
We are familiar, probably even excruciatingly bored, with the question: For whom does the writer write? Very rarely is the same degree of social angst encountered in the case of the critic. Indeed the question is very rarely posed: For whom does the critic write? For Mr Dele Bus-Stop of Idi-Oro? Or for the Appointments and Promotions Committee and the learned Journals International Syndicate of Berne, Harvard, Nairobi, Oxford, or Prague? Unquestionably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critic who covers reams of paper with unceasing lament on the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when he himself assiduously engages, with a remorseless exclusivity, only the incestuous productivity of his own academic - that is, bourgeois-situated - literature. It is a very convenient case of having one's cake and eating it, or feeding on it, yet damning the output of producers of literatures in one's own community - often in the most scabrous, dismissive language - over and over again, treading the same grooves, looking for something new to say and never finding it, pouncing on the latest product of the same pariah writer like a famished voyager, building up CV's at the expense of the condemned productivity - the genuine productivity, not the parasitic kind which is the critic's - indeed, teaching it at all. 'Reactionary', 'elitist', 'privileged', 'a splurge of romantic decadence', 'articulator of the neo-colonial agent class' . . . well then, what is the critic doing?
Also, there was one passage that really spoke to me, on page 97, in The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies:
We are familiar, probably even excruciatingly bored, with the question: For whom does the writer write? Very rarely is the same degree of social angst encountered in the case of the critic. Indeed the question is very rarely posed: For whom does the critic write? For Mr Dele Bus-Stop of Idi-Oro? Or for the Appointments and Promotions Committee and the learned Journals International Syndicate of Berne, Harvard, Nairobi, Oxford, or Prague? Unquestionably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critic who covers reams of paper with unceasing lament on the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when he himself assiduously engages, with a remorseless exclusivity, only the incestuous productivity of his own academic - that is, bourgeois-situated - literature. It is a very convenient case of having one's cake and eating it, or feeding on it, yet damning the output of producers of literatures in one's own community - often in the most scabrous, dismissive language - over and over again, treading the same grooves, looking for something new to say and never finding it, pouncing on the latest product of the same pariah writer like a famished voyager, building up CV's at the expense of the condemned productivity - the genuine productivity, not the parasitic kind which is the critic's - indeed, teaching it at all. 'Reactionary', 'elitist', 'privileged', 'a splurge of romantic decadence', 'articulator of the neo-colonial agent class' . . . well then, what is the critic doing?
December 20, 2014
Soyinka is one of the greats, the lasting few, the champions of literature and of people alike. His criticism – these are mostly early essays, incidentals, speeches, addresses – is revelatory and important to those interested in his literature, politics, or Africa's literary situations more generally.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews