Soyinka's Postcolonial Drama 'Death and the King's Horseman' as a Syncretic Theatrical Text. The Establishment of a Moral Paradox

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: This paper argues that the establishment of this moral paradox is particularly conditioned by Soyinka's conscious choice of writing this play in the form of the syncretic theatre because the Yoruba's psychology is perfectly portrayed through cultural texts and a shift of dominants concerning the dramatic devices which enables the reader to empathise with the Yoruba culture and its, for a European audience, barbaric and illegal practices. On that account, this paper reads Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman as a syncretic theatrical text par excellence and aims to demonstrate how the specific elements of this genre are 2 implemented in the text as this is necessary to demonstrate the effect those elements have on the establishment of a moral paradox