This is KZSU Stanford.

Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus. The full name of this radio program is entitled

Opinions about life and literature.

The little word and is not nearly as innocent as it sounds.

Where and how do life and literature conjoin?

Where and how do they disjoint?

Keep in mind that life here means more than its biological incarnations.

It also means history and all the tragedies that leer at us whenever we open a newspaper. What are newspapers ultimately, if not

the chronicles of human misfortune? Many of those misfortunes are directly related to the fortunes made by those who can afford to buy the luxury items and precious jewels featured in the full-page ads of our major newspapers, alongside stories of unspeakable misery and degradation.

All this to say that our topic today on entitled opinions is life, literature, and tragedy, especially as they converge in post-colonial

literature. My guest, Atokwason, is eminently entitled to his opinions on the matter,

having recently published a book called Tragedy and Post-Colonial Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Ato Quasin is the author and editor of many other books as well, including aesthetic nervousness, disability, and the

crisis of representation. He is the Gene and Morris Doyle professor of interdisciplinary

studies and professor of English at Stanford, where he also chairs the Department of African

and African American Studies. He is a fellow

member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of America, and was the past president of the African

Studies Association, Ato Kuesen, welcome to entitled opinions. Thank you so much, Robert.

I'd like to begin by taking you back to a day in November 1995 when you learned that

the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Sarawiywa, along with eight of his colleagues, had been

hanged.

You had recently joined the faculty at Cambridge University and had just started teaching the university's tragedy course for undergraduates.

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