Homo Sacer, Colonial Sovereignty, and Ontological Crisis in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

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 coherence of that figure within the colonial encounter. Elesin Oba’s suspended subjectivity is not a metaphysical lapse or a tragic misreading between cultural grammars; it is a colonial deformation of ritual legibility, where the sacred and the abject no longer oppose but cohabit. The British interruption of Yoruba ritual suicide enacts more than cultural interference: it inaugurates a “state of exception” in which the suspension of indigenous law reasserts imperial sovereignty. Yet Soyinka’s dramaturgy exceeds Agamben’s juridico-political logic. Elesin is not merely abandoned by law but saturated by competing orders of ritual cosmology and colonial biopolitics that overdetermine his body. His death, once a consecrated passage, becomes a foreclosure of sacrifice itself as a recognizable form. In staging this impasse, Soyinka does not illustrate Agamben’s paradigm; he displaces it. What emerges is a sacrificial subject fractured between ritual investiture and colonial apprehension, whose interrupted body is left neither sanctified nor redeemed, but suspended in the epistemic violence of imperial modernity.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998.
—. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Bigot, Inés. “‘Our World Is Tumbling in the Void of Strangers’: A Failed Ritual in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.” Postcolonial Literatures and Arts, vol. 2, no. 1, 2024, OpenEdition, doi:10.4000/130gk.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey, Penguin Books, 2004.
George, Olakunle. “Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.” Representations, vol. 67, 1999, pp. 67–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/2902887.
Gibbs, James. Soyinka: Death and the King’s Horseman. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Gikandi, Simon. “African Literature and the Colonial Factor.” Postcolonial Criticism, edited by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Routledge, 2001, pp. 134–51.
Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 1, 2006, pp. 295–315. Annual Reviews, doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317.
Irele, F. Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Jeyifo, Biodun. The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Radical Humanist Tradition. New Beacon Books, 1985.
Lisi, Laura F. “Cosmos and History in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.” Modern Drama, advance online publication, 2024, https://doi.org/10.3138/md-67-4-1368.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 2001.
—. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Duke University Press, 2019.
McNulty, Eugene. “Before the Law(s): Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and the Passages of ‘Bare Life.’” Postcolonial Text, vol. 6, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1–14, doi:10.63260/pt.v6i3.1284.
Mekunda, Doreen. “Mytho-Ritual Dramaturgy: Death as Rite of Passage in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 9, no. 8, 2019, pp. 1012–21. David Publishing Company, doi:10.17265/2159-5836/2019.08.002.
Mohammadi, Midia, and Ali Salami. “A Loud Dance of Silence: The Unsaid of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 52, no. 4, 2022, pp. 116–32. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.08.
Okonkwo, Chuka A. “Postcolonial Theatre and the State of Exception: Rethinking Sovereignty in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.” Social Identities, vol. 27, no. 3, 2021, pp. 341–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2021.1896352.
Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama. Oxford University Press, 1995.
Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, and Wole Soyinka. Indiana University Press, 1997.
Salami, Ali, and Midia Mohammadi. “A Fanonian Reading of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests and Death and the King’s Horseman.” Literary Interdisciplinary Research Journal, vol. 3, no. 6, Winter–Spring 2021–2022, pp. 141–64. https://doi.org/10.30465/LIR.2021.31648.1165.
Smith, Robert P., Jr. “Review of Wole Soyinka Revisited, by Derek Wright.” World Literature Today, vol. 67, no. 4, Autumn 1993, p. 879. https://doi.org/10.2307/40149777.
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. Hill and Wang, 1987.
Topper, Ryan. “The Sacrificial Foundation of Modernity in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 50, no. 1, 2019, pp. 53–79. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.1.04.
Weyenberg, Astrid. “Ritual and Revolution: Wole Soyinka’s Bacchae, a Yoruba Tragedy.” The Politics of Adaptation, edited by Daniele Kersten and David Kimmich, Rodopi, 2013, pp. 43–64. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401209571_003.
Wright, Derek. Wole Soyinka Revisited. Twayne Publishers, 1993.
Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 30, Issue 2
September 2025
Pages 643-671

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics