پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان

پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان

Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسنده
Qutaiba Saleh Fenjan
Department of Journalism, Massmedia College, University of Thi-Qar, Nassiriya City. Iraq
10.22059/jor.2026.415233.2851
چکیده
Kongi’s Harvest proves postcolonial sovereignty to be not an immediate, but a carefully constructed artefact of aesthetic and historical manipulation. Through a reading which moves beyond the categories of ancient and modern, I show how the despot fortifies autocracy by capturing the architecture of rites, policing the national imagery, and terrorizing the new temporal infrastructure of the calendar and of the city. While the policy-maker seeks effective policy, the despot seizes autonomy and, through an inscription of terror, forces a shared communal harvest into a national epoch which aims to turn a public into a mass undifferentiated “now.” An analysis of the aesthetic architecture of performative government, however, reveals its vulnerability: broadcast sound saturation, image inoculation, and the dictation of slogans are ultimately unable to efface the affect- and body-based workings of the rituals which the tyrant co-opts. When the enormous collective body of the New Yam Festival is instrumentalized in order to produce a PR exercise which assumes that communal consensus can be turned into images of surrender, this construction of the despot’s sovereignty is explosively betrayed by the power of embodied history, which stands up in mass demonstration against the appropriation of the community’s traditions and lives for a personal PR coup. Drawing on media criticism, chronopolitics, and critical spectacle theory in order to identify the structural contradictions of the aesthetics of dictatorships vis-à-vis the subject forces which they try to neutralize, I will finally argue that, though the postcolonial state may indeed master its chronogram, the reordering of space, and the production of visual representations, it will always ultimately fail to triumph over the elemental force of the embodied, corporeal dynamics of the ritual body.
کلیدواژه‌ها
Chronopolitics
Ritual
Spectacle
Postcolonial Sovereignty
Media Technologies
Necropolitics
موضوعات
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ayyıldız, Simge, and Samet Güven. 2025. “Unearthing the Intersection of Unbelonging and Postcolonialism in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest.” Afyon Kocatepe Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 27 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.32709/akusosbil.1295852.
Bigot, Inés. 2019. “Dance and Dissidence in Wole Soyinka’s Plays: From Status Quo to Revolution.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 42 (1): 9–23. https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.609.
Crehan, Stewart. 1990. “The Spirit of Negation in the Works of Soyinka.” Research in African Literatures 21 (4): 15–31. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3819319.
Cyzewski, Julie. 2021. “The ‘Tribal Drum’ and Literary Radio: The Postcolonial Poetics of the Transcription Centre’s Africa Abroad.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0197.
Debord, Guy. 1990. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso.
Fai, Gilbert Tarka. 2017. “Festival in the Theatre of Wole Soyinka: ‘The Occasion for Speaking’ in the Postcolonial State.” Epitome: International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 3 (7): 36–49. https://www.epitomejournals.com/VolumeArticles/FullTextPDF/279_Research_Paper.pdf.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Gibbs, James. 1982. “The Masks Hatched Out.” Theatre Research International 7 (3): 180–206. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883300000638.
Handelman, Don. 1997. “Rituals/Spectacles.” International Social Science Journal 49 (153): 387–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.1997.tb00031.x.
Ibitokun, Benedict M. 1982. “The Pseudo-Selves: An Aspect of Soyinka’s Dramaturgy.” World Literature Written in English 21 (1): 27–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449858208588699.
Ilori, Oluwakemi Atanda. 2016. “The Theatre of Wole Soyinka: Inside the Liminal World of Myth, Ritual and Postcoloniality.” PhD diss., University of Leeds. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/15733/.
Mathuray, Mark. 2009. “Dramatising the Sacred: Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Fourth Stage’ and Kongi’s Harvest.” In On the Sacred in African Literature: Old Gods and New Worlds, 45–85. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230240919_3.
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131298.
Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson. 2007. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka. Cross/Cultures 93. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004358126.
Olaniyan, Tejumola, ed. 2017. State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2005vzd.
Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta, eds. 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Soyinka, Wole. 1967. Kongi’s Harvest: A Play. London: Oxford University Press.
Soyinka, Wole. 1976. “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy.” In Myth, Literature and the African World, 140–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weales, Gerald. 1974. “Wole Soyinka: Yoruba Plays for All Tribes.” The Hollins Critic 11 (5): 1–13.
Weise, Constanze. 2013. “Governance and Ritual Sovereignty at the Niger–Benue Confluence: A Political and Cultural History of Nigeria’s Igala, Northern Yoruba and Nupoid-Speaking Peoples to 1900 CE.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99c4w9qn.
Wright, Derek. 1990. “The Festive Year: Wole Soyinka’s Annus Mirabilis.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 28 (3): 511–19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/161232.
پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان
دوره 31، شماره 2
بهار 1405
صفحه 327-344