Title: Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process
Author: Udenta O. Udenta
Publisher: Kraft Book, ibadan
Pagination: 392
Year: 2015
Reviewer: Henry Akubuiro
The first edition of Udenta O. Udenta’s Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process was written as a 23-year old student rounding off his masters. Over a decade after it was first published, it has continued to be referenced by scholars within Africa and outside Africa. Surprisingly, only 1,000 copies, published by Fourth Dimension, Enugu, were all that got out.
From Alamin Mazrui (in “Socialist-Oriented Literature in Postcolonial Africa: Retrospective and Prospective) to Pius Adesanmi (in an interview with Nnorom Azuonye –“Of Generation and Limits”), Onookome Okome (in Before I am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics and Dissent), Stephaine Newell (in West African Literature: Ways of Reading), Ayobanmi Kehinde (in “An Aesthetic of Realism: The Image of Postcolonial Africa”), Handel Kashope Wright’s “Cultural Studies as Praxis: (Making) an Autobiographical Case”, to “Katalin Egri Ku-Mesa (in “The Survival of African Literature outside the Mainstream Euro-American Outlets”), to mention a few, Udenta’s Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process has been a critical goldmine.
The passage of time has made it inevitable for the author to substantially rework the entire text. Unlike other portions of the book which have been reworked in this edition, Udenta has retained the “Conclusion” and the “Literary Situation in Nigeria” with a few editorial amendments. The pagination of this second edition, expectedly, has increased, and what we have now is a garnished critical gourmet.
Udenta warns in the introductory chapter that the polemical tinge of this work doesn’t call for any apology. His intellectual project is a logical extension of the interrupted materialist discourse inaugurated by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, and an organic refunctioning of the essential revolutionary of the essential revolutionary cultural and aesthetic thought in Africa.
Udenta recognises the writings of some African writers to manifest the fundamentals of revolutionary aesthetics vis: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, etcetera; Sembene Ousmane’s The Last of the Empire and God’s Bit of Wood; Sahle Sellasie’s The Afresta and The Firebrands; Festus Iyayi’s The Violence, The Contract, and Heroes.
Others include Tunde Fatunde’s plays: No Food No Country, No More Oil Boom, Water No Get Enemy, etcetera; Femi Osofisan’s Morountodun, No More the Wasted Breed, Once Upon Four Robbers, etcetera; Tess Onwueme’s The Desert Encroaches, In Search of a Theme, among others.
Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African the African Literary Process is a work in two parts –“Theoretical and Philosophical Considerations: Issues in Ideo-Aesthetics” and Textual Discourses” –with chapters in-between the bifurcations. In the first part, the author addresses revolutionary aesthetics as it borders critical realism, modernism and postmodernism, and the “present” stage. Besides, he studies the democratisation of dramaturgy, tracing its socio-historical, ideo-aesthetic and class imperatives.
Still in Part 1, the author studies the “popular” spirit in African literature in which some misconceptions about mass literature are examined, just as he deconstructs elitist literature and its “kitsch” counterpart, cultivation of artistic taste, historical materialism, etc.
In the second part of the book, Udenta begins with a study of the political and ideological aesthetics of Festus Iyayi’s Violence and Meja Nwangi’s Going Down River. Here, the author thrashes out humanist context of their thematic preoccupations, the static and dialectical imperatives of characterization and nature of reality, concluding with the limitations of critical realism and the challenges for revolutionary aesthetics.
Deploying the highly technical Eagletonian schema, the author embarks on a “materialist” reading of Festus Iyayi’s The Contract. The Eagletonian schema is a typology developed within the broad and sometimes contradictory spectrum of the radical social thesis of literature. In this chapter, Udenta examines the General Mode of Production, Literary Mode of Production and the Political Economy of Cultural Production. Also, studied are authorial ideology and revolutionary possibility, aesthetic ideology.
Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, is often regarded as a work of critical realism, but, trust Udenta’s reading, we are served a sweetened broth in the seventh chapter where TFA lends itself to a study bordering on the class structure, social relations and dialectics of social change. The Umuofia social formation in TFA, carols Udenta, is open and egalitarian, considering the social mobility of Mazi Okonkwo. How this class structure changed during the colonial rule is also a matter of interest to you and I.
The radical consciousness in Tess Onwueme’s The Desert Encroaches is juxtaposed with Tunde Fatunde’s No Food No Country in the 9th chapter, while the socio-aesthetic and ideological content of Tunde Fatunde’s plays form the basis of the tenth chapter. Onwueme features again in the eleventh chapter, this time, her Broken Calabash and The Reign of Wazobia are studied by the author with a poser: “Feminism or Total Revolution?”
Udenta declares in the conclusion that “Nigeria’s desperate literary situation is a signification of her desperate socio-economic situation.” The significance of this book is that it captures a moment in transition in Nigerian literature with an intriguing dialectical reading that opens our eyes to the diverse possibilities of the African literary intercourse. This revised edition is mind-blowing.