{"title":"Nationhood in South Sudan Cinema: The Iconicity of Motherhood in Akuol de Mabior’s No Simple Way Home (2023)","authors":"A. Mututa","doi":"10.1017/asr.2024.40","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Post-cessation nationhood in South Sudan presented a paradoxical situation: a country united during struggle is fragmented after independence. Among the triggers for this scenario was the death of Dr John Garang de Mabior—the country’s founding father. This article is a multidisciplinary semiotic critique of Akuol de Mabior’s film, No Simple Way Home (2023), against the history of South Sudanese nationhood. Without claiming a political scientific analysis, the author proposes that South Sudan’s crisis of nationhood is symptomatic of a quest for a unifying icon. He theorizes the protagonist’s quintessence of motherhood as a semiotic gesture of her de jure iconicity of unified nationhood.","PeriodicalId":7618,"journal":{"name":"African Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"African Studies Review","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.40","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"AREA STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Post-cessation nationhood in South Sudan presented a paradoxical situation: a country united during struggle is fragmented after independence. Among the triggers for this scenario was the death of Dr John Garang de Mabior—the country’s founding father. This article is a multidisciplinary semiotic critique of Akuol de Mabior’s film, No Simple Way Home (2023), against the history of South Sudanese nationhood. Without claiming a political scientific analysis, the author proposes that South Sudan’s crisis of nationhood is symptomatic of a quest for a unifying icon. He theorizes the protagonist’s quintessence of motherhood as a semiotic gesture of her de jure iconicity of unified nationhood.
期刊介绍:
African Studies Review (ASR) is the flagship scholarly journal of the African Studies Association (USA). The ASR publishes the highest quality African studies scholarship in all academic disciplines. The ASR’s rigorous interdisciplinary peer review seeks to contribute to the development of scholarly conversations of interest to the diverse audience of the Association’s membership and to the growth of African studies in North America, on the African continent, and in a global comparative context.