The Audrey Richards Lecture in African Studies 2022

“Tragedy, Disputatiousness, and Unruly Affective Economies: From the Greeks to Postcolonial Literature” - Prof Ato Quayson, Stanford University. This lecture was given at Trinity Hall on Tuesday 31 May 2022. This lecture will pick up on an element of literary tragedy that I 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 vrs. Tiresias, Clytemnestra vrs Agamemnon, Medea vrs Jason, and Antigone vrs 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. I side with Jean Pierre-Vernant in reading Greek tragedy as illustrating the incomplete transition between religious and ethical discourses, such that concepts such as dikē(justice), nómos (law and custom), and ethos (the fundamental character or spirit of a culture) all come to do double service and are thus articulated by individual characters are the subjects of life-and-death disagreements. In Shakespeare’s big tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, historical disputatiousness is aligned to unruly affective economies. While the link between the two domains of history and affect helps to mark Shakespeare as modern, in postcolonial tragedy it is the conditions of precarity and the ambiguation of attitudes to individual and collective acts of heroism that demarcates the tragic. This is what we find when we reroute tragic history through Fanon. Whether with Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, repeatedly what generates affective unruliness are the conditions that mark both colonial and postcolonial modernity and that render our actions against disorder themselves incoherent and often futile. I will be drawing examples from different literary traditions and cultures but will focus for illustration specifically on the rural novels of Chinua Achebe for examples to anchor the argument for the audience.