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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Antisocial Soyinka
| Panel |
4. "African Oedipus"
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| Paper ID | 683 |
| Author(s) |
Corley, Ide
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | Taking the antisocial thesis in queer theory (Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman) as the paradigm for a revised reading of Wole Soyinka’s _The Interpreters_ (1965), this paper seeks to re-orient, more generally, the literary criticism of this radical writer. Biodun Jeyifo, K. Anthony Appiah and Ato Quayson have correctly cautioned readers against assuming that we know how Yoruban cultural elements in Soyinka’s oeuvre signify. But undoing the conjunction of Yoruban culture and a thoroughgoing pastoral organicism (irreducibly tied up with patriarchal nationalism) requires us, I argue here, to go beyond the “inclusive” and “multicultural” paradigms of a desacralized, post-nationalist aesthetic to consider instead Soyinka’s relentless inscriptions of Oedipal antagonism within the field of the social. With attention to the analogies between the orisha Er/Inle and the queer and diasporic figures of Joe Golder and James Baldwin in _The Interpreters_, this paper construes post-national qualifiers of territorialized culture in Soyinka’s writing as an obstacle to rather than a “simultaneous relativization and affirmation of the traditional mode of tragic agency” (Quayson). The question it poses for Soyinka’s audience is: what consequences might arise from recognizing the antagonism inscribed in Soyinka’s oeuvre between formal logic, Yoruba tradition and neoliberal authority?
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