The Shifting Structures of Power in The Beatification of Area Boy

Abstract

Wole Soyinka's creative works are primarily responses to the upheavals within Nigerian society. Although he has been accused of not being "ideologically committed" and of mythologizing essentially mundane experiences by Marxist critics, his life and writings reflect his daring resistance to tyranny. His creative and critical works show his responses to sociopolitical events in Nigeria past and present — as a sustained engagement with the State and a "historical" record of the different forms and manifestations of power at different periods. Taking Africa, and Nigeria in particular, as his subject, there is a way in which his creative and critical works — in their range, content, and form — reflect the inherent relationship "between literature and its sponsoring context".