Title: Arts, Society and Identity
Author: Udenta O. Udenta
Publisher: Kraft Book, Ibadan
Year: 2018
Pagination: 436
Reviewer: Henry Akubuiro
The second edition of Art, Society and Identity: Essays on African Literature, which arrives more than twenty years after it was first published, seems to worth the time lapse. It is more voluminous and previously unpublished materials have been incorporated to add to its substance.
A book in three parts, essays in the first part, “Revolutionary Aesthetics and the Development of Radical Criticism in African Literature: Issues in Meta-Criticism” were written thirty years ago, between 1988 and 1989, when the author was a researcher and lecturer at Abia State University, Uturu.
Part Two is also a carryover from the first edition, but, like the first part of the book, the author has rewritten significant portions of the essays here as a response to ever changing landscape vis-à-vis discursive strategies.
Other essays, especially in the third part, were written much later as a response to the philosophical, cultural, aesthetic and ideological nuances of the 21st century in content and discursive strategies. With these, Udenta takes us on an inexpensive pilgrimage into topical ideological transitions in Nigeria, nay African writings over the last forty years.
One major profit one is wont to maximise in this intellectual harvest is that Arts, Society and Identity… offers a contrasting reading of postcolonial African literature from the standpoint of its uncompromising rebuttal of the pervading postmodernist and poststructuralist takeover of the postcolonial African critical enterprise. It, therefore, yields ample materials to enrich the critical vineyard for students and scholars willing to plough.
The book begins with a long introduction of how the treatise was birthed. Udenta, in Part One of the book, establishes a cogent reason for enshrining revolutionary aesthetics in the African literary domain. New to Africa, compared to Europe, Udenta states it has made a gradual inroad in this part of the world as a welcome alternative, with many African writers adopting the aesthetics in their creative endeavours.
Rather than dissipating energy in fruitless polemics or internecine squabbles, Udenta is interested the consolidation of gains of radical scholarship in its battle with conservative critical tradition by positing a historically grounded theory of revolutionary aesthetics and its bearing on African literary criticism, intent on consolidating its tenterhooks on African literary scholarship.
To this end, he sets out to situate the historical imperative of the ideo-aesthetics while flooring Gugelberger for not creating a coherent picture of the African literary process in Marxism and African Literature. Gugelberger bears the brunt of Udenta’s pillory in this chapter in subtopics such as literary debates on the development of revolutionary aesthetics, misjudgment of Zhadanovism, Bretch and Lucacs, and his dismissal of euro-Marxist aesthetics.
Udenta contends that any account about the emergence of African revolutionary aesthetics which does not take into account Alex La Guma’s recorded and published interviews and comments on literature in The Writer in Modern Africa, is unserious. However, he acknowledges Emmanuel Ngara’s Arts and Ideology in the African Novel as the most systematic and well-organised study of the influence of Marxism on African literature and the task before a revolutionary aesthetician in analysing that literature, though he picks holes in his shying away from the controversy surrounding social realism.
The first chapter in Part Two of Art, Society and Identity… focuses on ideology, politics and social change in the African novel with emphasis on Chinua Achebe. Udenta pays special attention to Achebe’s last published novel, Anthills of the Savanah, which he believes is where Achebe situates his most cogent statement on ideology, politics and social change.
The author comes up with “creative eclecticism” to categorise Achebe’s new narrative form in There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, whereby he dissolves the boundaries between history and art on one hand and aesthetics and ideology on the other. He declaims that ideology, politics and social change will continue to be an integral part of the African literary process. As the chapter winds up, Udenta focuses attention on There was a Country, bringing out the merits therein, plus arguments for and against it by commentators.
The second chapter in Part Two dwells on “Journey of Search: Revolutionary Ethos in Ngugi’s Matigari”, while the third is on “Outcasts in an Alienated Environment: Image of the Urban Poor in Meja Nwangi’s Kill me Quick and Going Down River Road. Identitarian issues in Tess Onwueme’s drama occupies the interest of the author in the fourth chapter. Her play, Legacies, says Udenta, is a “play of identity-search cast in epic proportions”, set in Idu, a mythical Igbo village. He subsequently explores identity-search through growth in consciousness and self-knowledge in the drama piece.
This study also reserves a befitting space for the late poet, Ezenwa Ohaeto. Entitled “The Traveller as a Combatant: A Reading of Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s Songs of a Traveller”, Udenta submits that the song school, conceived by Okot p’Bitek in Song of Lawino, has been revived by Ezenwa Ohaeto in Songs of a Traveller and Niyi Osundare in Songs of the Market Place. Like Osundare, Ohaeto is an ideological combatant, positing new visions and ideals about an acceptable and democratic mode of production and structure of social relations, through an innovative and refreshing socio-aesthetics. The book comes in trendy hardcopy.