2022 Berlin Lecture: Professor Ato Quayson

The lecture took place in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium (LWA) at Wolfson College Oxford, on May 19th 2022. Please see below for the lecture abstract: "Disputatiousness and Unruly Affective Economies: From the Greeks to Postcolonial Tragedy This lecture will pick up on an element of literary tragedy that was raised in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature but was not fully elaborated, namely, the place of disputatiousness in the history of tragic form and how this might help us to understand tragedy in world literature. The Greeks give us great examples of disputatiousness: Oedipus vrs. Tiresias, Clytemnestra vrs Agamemnon, Medea vrs Jason, and Antigone vrs Creon, among others. But the determining mark of the Greek tragic characters was what might be described as their zero-sum wrath. Their sense of rightness goes as far as courting possible self-destruction. My understanding of this mode of disputatiousness is different from what Hegel lays out in his discussion of tragedy in The Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Aesthetics. Rather, I side with Jean Pierre-Vernant in reading Greek tragedy as illustrating the incomplete transition between religious and ethical discourses, such that concepts such as dikē (justice), nómos (law and custom), and ethos (the fundamental character or spirit of a culture) all come to do double service and are thus articulated by individual characters as the subjects of life-and-death disagreements. Disputatiousness takes on a different guise in Shakespeare, where the more disputatious plays such as Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus are not considered among his most profound. Rather, in the big tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, historical disputatiousness is aligned to unruly affective economies. It is the link between the two domains of history and affect that marks Shakespeare as modern and from which we can derive a model for understanding the characterological types and their socio-political conditions in postcolonial tragedy. The lecture will proffer a broad theory of postcolonial tragedy drawing examples from different literary traditions and cultures, but will specifically focus on the rural novels of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the work of JM Coetzee, among others.” Launched in 1990 to celebrate the 80th birthday of the College's Founding President, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Berlin Lecture is in his own field of study, the history of ideas. Each Trinity Term, we welcome speakers of the stature of Professor Amartya Sen, Professor Roy Foster, Professor Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and Baroness Helena Kennedy. PLEASE NOTE: Every effort is made to credit copyright in these events, but we would always be delighted to hear from copyright owners to include any credits due in future.