'The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame'

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Simpson, Michael. 2007. 'The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame'. In: Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, eds. Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford: OUP, pp. 86-100. ISBN 978-0199296101 [Book Section]

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Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism and then a rich field for creating cultural identities that blend the old and the new. Nobel prize-winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by international scholars, who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

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