2rd Tejumola Olaniyan Memorial Lecture 

 

This lecture picks up on an element of literary tragedy that Quayson raised in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature but did not fully elaborate, namely, the place of disputatiousness in the history of tragic form and how this might help us to further tragedy from the Greeks to African literature. The Greeks give us great examples of disputatiousness: Oedipus vs. Tiresias, Clytemnestra vs Agamemnon, Medea vs Jason, and Antigone vs Creon, among others. But the determining mark of the Greek tragic characters was what might be described as their zero-sum wrath. Their sense of rightness goes as far as courting possible self-destruction. What we find in African and postcolonial tragedy is the transposition of historical disputatiousness into the ambiguation of attitudes to heroic action, whether collective or individual, which is itself brought on by colonial modernity. The lecture proffers a theory of African and postcolonial tragedy drawing on a reading of colonial history and its relationship to the fraught individual processes of self-accounting. Quayson draws examples from different literary traditions and cultures but specifically focuses on the rural novels of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God) to ground his central propositions.

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Professor Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English, and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University. He was educated at the University of Ghana and the University of Cambridge. He taught at the University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and New York University before arriving at Stanford. Professor Quayson has published six monographs and eight edited collections, including Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2014), which was the 2015 co-winner of the Urban History Association’s Best Book Prize (non-North America) and was listed by The Guardian as one of the 10 Best Books on Cities in 2014. His most recent book Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021) been awarded the 2021 Warren- Brooks Award for literary criticism.  Professor Quayson is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.