Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1994. Pantheon Books. 0679400656. . 336 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration and design by Archie Ferguson.
DESCRIPTION - By 'unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest' (New York Times), Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage is a fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multi-culturalism. This volume brings together nineteen iconoclastic essays from the past twenty-five years on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics - many of which are published here for the first time. Whether he is discoursing on the idea of 'negritude' in 'From a Common Backcloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image' or on protest literature in 'The Writer in a Modern African State'; debunking the orthodoxies of contemporary literary criticism in 'The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies'; offering surprising readings of Shakespeare and Aristophanes; expounding on the tragedy of 'the recurrent cycle of human stupidity'; skewering intellectual demigods or his own critics, Soyinka is never less than profound and incisive. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gives a startling vision of culture in our times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study 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 struggle for independence from Great Britain. 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. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, 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 via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.
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