A Dance Of The Forest: On Wole Soyinka's Dramas In The Context Of Post-Colonialism

This dissertation A Dance of(he Forest:On Wole Soyinka 's Dramas in the context of Post-Colonialism focuscon the cultural features in the Post-Colonial playwright Wole Soyinka,a Nigerian black writer,who won the Nobel Prize of literature in 1986.Post-Colonialism is a tactic of cultural infiltration and cultural invasion,which Western capitalist nations carry out to the "backward " nations and countries,in other words,a phenomenon of unfair across-cultural communication. In face of the cultural colonization done by Western capitalist nations,pre-colonial writers work actively to resist its colonial culture and recreate the cultural images of their own. Soyinka is a brave figure among them. In his writings of the context that resist Western cultural colonization,Soyinka integrates the native culture and the culture of the West. On the basis of the native culture,he establishes a narrative model of farcical imitation to dispel and avianize the Western main-current narrative model counter-discursively. This dissertation mainly discusses the two Post-Colonial features in Soyinka's dramas:native nature and political nature.West and the rest is an important pair of opposite conceptions in the Post-Colonial Theory. For a long time the West has been regarding itself as "West" or "center" and defining the rest "the rest". By the end of the colonial era,more and more oriental and the third world people realized that "the rest" wasn't a nickname of them. So,in the context of Post-Colonialism,the Oriental and the third world people voluntarily awoke to the duty to enhance the native culture. Chapter one,section one mainly focuses on the distinctive irrationalities color in Soyinka's dramas. That's his inheritance and development of the black African traditional culture,Which,in details,were reflected in three aspects,myth and ritual;the cyclic conception of birth-to-death and the primitive religious beliefs. From such things,Soyinka shows us a comprehensive picture of irrational culture in black Africa;he tries to establish a harmonious and united traditional cultural system to resist the rational and technical Western modern culture. Furthermore,the same section also discusses the colonial features in Soyinka's dramatic language:musical language and metamorphic English. In doing so,he offers Post-colonial writers a practicable writing tactic to resist the main-current discourse. He perfectly combines English with the metaphorical,sonorous Yoruba traditional language,and skillfully uses the music as the second language,dance as the third language to strengthen dramatic effect. Meanwhile,he creates and changes the English he used with African native features,mainly by using the following methods,such as:"double languages";"phrases change" and "semantic extension" etc. Writing in English is the shadow branded by colonialism and the incompetent choice chosen by history,but as a Post-Colonial writer,Soyinka still uses the non-pure English to resist imperial language colonization.In essence,Post-Colonial theory is a kind of political cultural theory with distinctive ideological critical nature. So,the political nature becomes an important feature in Post-Colonial literary creation. Section two of this chapter emphatically analyses another Post-Colonial feature in contexts of Soyinka's dramas:political nature. As a Byronic figure who can't restrain his cry for freedom,Soyinka is more like a fighter who struggles for the miserable destiny of Negro than a scholar and writer. Therefore,he starts the precedent of "Resistance Theatre",using a series of highly political and agitated "shot-gun drama" to attack the dictatorship of native government.Through the analysis above,we come to such a conclusion:Soyinka is an eminent dramatist in the context of Post-Colonialism who combines the European culture with African culture successfully. He tirelessly writes on the basis of African national tradition and widely absorbs the nutrition of Western classical culture and modern arts,using native culture to dispel Western centralis...