In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

I argue in Chapter 4 that Wole Soyinka’s essentially dramatic gifts are geared more towards anti-mimeticism than towards any form of naturalistic representation and that when staging character and setting in his anti-mimetic plays, he elects a dramatic medium that allows their largely aesthetic-political messages to be communicated through cryptic and often elusive ritual meanings. Thus, in The Road, Professor illustrates a sense of edginess through the amplifying delirium that he experiences in attempting to merge Yorùbá and Christian epistemologies in pursuit of the Word. While Death and the King’s Horseman presents a minute interpretation of the moving parts involved in an error of judgment, reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis that would have been much appreciated by Aristotle. The latter play also illustrates several elements reminiscent of the Greeks, such as a strong degree of disputatiousness, a carefully choreographed chorus-function, and an idea of the pharmakos that aligns sacrifice directly with the welfare of the polis.

Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.