The Politics of Identity and the Identity of Politics: the Self as an Agent of Redemption in Wole Soyinka's Camwood on the Leaves and The Strong Breed. pp.187 - 196.

The paper argues that Wale Soyinka's Camwood on the Leaves and The Strong Breed offer us a notion of Self as Agency that is a critique of African tradition, modernity and, above all, the Post-Modernist revalorization of the subject. It is argued that Soyinka proffers a post Post-Structuralism Humanist interrogation as well as reclamation of subjectivity in which Selfhood is conveived of as a site of reponsibility and transformation. The study explores the ways in which the two plays depict slightly overlapping, but nevertheless distinct progressions of the subject in iuts engfagement with the hegemonic. It shows how Camwood on the Leaves emphasises coubnter-identification as the principal mans by which the transformative subject disengages from dominant authority and further argues that The Strong Breed goes beyond counter-identification, suggesting the need for the transformative subject's reconstitution of an alternative vision of agency and the world.