This essay revisits Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, only to fracture the conceptual coherence of that figure within the colonial encounter. Elesin Oba’s suspended subjectivity is not construed as a metaphysical lapse or a tragic misreading between divergent cultural grammars; rather, it is diagnosed as a colonial deformation of ontological legibility where the sacred and the abject no longer oppose but cohabit. The British disruption of Yoruba ritual suicide enacts more than cultural interference; it inaugurates a “state of exception” whereby the suspension of indigenous law paradoxically reaffirms imperial sovereignty. Yet Soyinka’s dramaturgy exceeds Agamben’s juridico-political logic: Elesin is not merely abandoned by law but saturated by competing theologies—ritual cosmology and colonial biopolitics—that overdetermine his being. Elesin becomes the site of a foreclosure not simply of sovereignty, but of sacrifice itself as a legible form. In staging this impasse, Soyinka the nobel-winning Nigerian writer does not merely illustrate Agamben’s paradigm; he displaces it. What emerges is a sacrificial subject fractured between ritual investiture and colonial apprehension, whose death ceases to function as either passage or redemption, becoming instead a blur—diffused, deferred, and disarticulated by the epistemic violence of imperial modernity.
Salami, A. (2025). Homo Sacer, Colonial Sovereignty, and Ontological Crisis in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. Research in Contemporary World Literature, (), -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.397647.2667
MLA
Salami, A. . "Homo Sacer, Colonial Sovereignty, and Ontological Crisis in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman", Research in Contemporary World Literature, , , 2025, -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.397647.2667
HARVARD
Salami, A. (2025). 'Homo Sacer, Colonial Sovereignty, and Ontological Crisis in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman', Research in Contemporary World Literature, (), pp. -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.397647.2667
CHICAGO
A. Salami, "Homo Sacer, Colonial Sovereignty, and Ontological Crisis in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman," Research in Contemporary World Literature, (2025): -, doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.397647.2667
VANCOUVER
Salami, A. Homo Sacer, Colonial Sovereignty, and Ontological Crisis in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. Research in Contemporary World Literature, 2025; (): -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.397647.2667
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