Matatu最新文献

{"title":"Towards the Empowerment of the Vanquished","authors":"Tao Zou, Augustine H. Asaah","doi":"10.1163/18757421-bja00010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-bja00010","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Against the background of the 19th century British domination of Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1978) depicts the restorative activities of a group of traditional health practitioners. The paper seeks to place African Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the heart of the resistance to colonialism and imperialism. The paper resorts to a close reading of the narrative guided by perspectives on recuperation provided by Armah, Amilcar Cabral, and Christel N. Temple. Traditional medicinal expertise, ecological awareness, cultural memory, and anthroponymy, as bearers of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, coalesce to discredit the metropolitan miscomception of Africa as a tabula rasa, thereby infusing confidence into subalternized Blacks towards the dream of a reunified continent. The paper concludes that resistance to the empire entails politics and ethics of healing, empowerment, continuous mental decolonization, and commitment to African reunification.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"95 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141926758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What about Love?","authors":"Ana Nenadović","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the representation of love in two contemporary Nigerian novels, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms (2015) and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). Inspired by bell hooks’s understanding of love and Dani d’Emilia and Daniel B. Chávez’s manifesto Radical Tenderness Is … I suggest the concept of defiant love as a tool for analysing love as a form of civic dissent in these novels. ‘Defiant love,’ as I understand it, embraces the complementary duality of love as emotion and action. Consequently, to allow the emotion of love to evolve in violent and patriarchal circumstances already constitutes dissent with the status quo. I argue that the two novels explore relationships and alliances that defy patriarchal structures, in particular gender norms and heteronormativity. Season of Crimson Blossoms and The Death of Vivek Oji depict the potentiality of defiant love, be it between a middle-aged widow and a young man, or queer young people, in socio-political contexts of continuous political and ethnic tensions, oppression and violence. The novels negotiate what constitutes dissent and what role affects play in moments of civic dissent.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"106 26","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138600015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Na Today?","authors":"S. David","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Lekki Tollgate massacre, which was part of the brutal tactics used to put down the #EndSARS protests, underscored the incorrigibly violent nature of the Nigerian state. It also ruptured the sense of linear progressive time which governs the hegemonic conception of history and memory in Nigeria—for instance, time as post-civil war, post-dictatorship, etc. The boundary of this idea of a nation on a progressive march, made up of people healed of all traumas, and cured of their historical scars is fiercely and violently policed. A case in point is the fervour with which Biafra as a form of collective memory is being resisted and silenced. However, the murderous incident at the tollgate brought to the fore the fact that each violent moment in Nigeria’s turbulent history has created a fractured sense of history for many victims, and consequently hampered the possibility of forging a settled sense of belonging and national unity. One site where this sense of history as violently fractured has been adequately imagined is the creative arts, especially poetry. Poems have archived, mediated, and remediated memories of violence that are mostly excised from official history. Thus, in this article I read selected poems from Soro Soke, a poetry collection curated by Brittle Paper in collaboration with James Yeku and Jumoke Verissimo. My aim is to examine how the poetic responses to the Lekki massacre generate alternative, unvarnished historiographies that call attention to the haunting and brooding presence of Nigeria’s brutal past in the present. I am also interested in the ways in which the selected works act as archives of violent memories and how they seek to recover the humanity of those killed by naming them and grieving their loss.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"103 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138599875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literature as Worldly Action","authors":"Alessandra Di Pietro","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper aims to demonstrate how the various declinations of public and private dissent represented in a contemporary work of African literature, The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) by Akwaeke Emezi, can be read as an instance of literature’s world-making capacity. As the novel’s title anticipates, The Death of Vivek Oji reconstructs the life of its eponymous protagonist and the events that led to their death (Vivek is a non-binary, transgender person and both male and female pronouns are used to refer to them). Emezi’s novel is set in Nigeria during the late 1990s and the narrative actively engages in a representation of the socio-political situation of the country back then, covering the impact that the sudden death of the head of state, Sani Abacha, had on the population. Throughout the novel, dissent is depicted on two levels: on the one hand, it appears as an expression of democratic desire through the public protests against the country’s politics, as well as acts of violence against and among ethno-religious groups; on the other hand, there is also a parallel representation of private dissent in terms of the affirmation of one’s own identity. Vivek’s decision to not cut their long hair becomes, therefore, a form of personal opposition against society’s pre-imposed gendered constructs. In this sense, if the social stigma attached to members of the LGBT community is personified by the incapacity of Vivek’s parents to accept and understand their non-binary child, Vivek’s friends represent a communal act of resistance against such an oppressive social system. Ultimately, the opposition between public and private dissent finds its climax in Vivek’s death, in its causes and consequences. Building the critical analysis of the novel upon recent conceptualisations of literature as an active force that provokes dissent (Cheah 2016, Burns 2019), this paper demonstrates how Emezi’s narrative uses representations of public and private dissent to contest the current world in order to engage in the construction of a more equal one.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"85 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138600112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trust in Shared Narratives","authors":"Esther Nyam, V. Hediger","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Stories are a function of violent conflicts. Stories provide reasons for and can serve to instigate conflicts, they make conflicts readable, and they provide narrative closure, i.e., a sense of finality, and thus potentially restore trust between conflict parties. This study focuses on a specific form of storytelling used in a conflict setting, namely docudrama and re-enactment of traumatic experiences of conflict. The study posits that, in the absence of other forms of effective civic dissent to force better outcomes in governance and particularly the provision of security through the state, docudrama and the re-enactment of personal experiences of violence can lead to conscientization and healing, even as the stories expressed in re-enactment lay the groundwork for post-conflict narrative closure. The location of study is in Benue and Plateau States, Nigeria. Because of climate change and migratory pressures in the wake of the drying up of Lake Chad these states are prone to violent land disputes. The target population of the study are refugees affected by conflicts between Fulani herdsmen and farmers, who are currently estimated at over 100,000. The study offers an opportunity to be active participants and to acquire skills and training in storytelling and re-enactment primarily to women, children and youths. Interviews, focus group discussions (FGD s), and participatory observation are used to collect data. A pilot study in Daudu camp in Guma LGA (Local Government Area) and later in 2023, a Theatre for Development and a feature film was carried out in Adeke, Ogondu and Asyoko community of Benue State and a Theatre for Development Drama and Feature Film production carried out in Mikang LGA of Plateau State illustrate the methods and aims of the study. Anchored in “Reflective African Theory” the study uses Brecht’s “Forum Theatre” technique to show how docudrama can be used to explore the motives of the violent conflict and contribute to the rebuilding of trust in situations of conflict. The study, which results from a collaboration between the authors in the framework of the World Academy of Sciences, aims to contribute to the corpus of African studies and offer new perspectives for peace and conflict studies.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"136 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138598943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Proximate Thuggery","authors":"Tolulope Akinwole","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, I rethink thuggery, an overt form of dissent, as a spatial structural frame. Through a close reading of everyday forms of thuggery in Nigeria, exemplified in literary, musical, and photographic forms, I argue that not only is thuggery ubiquitous in the African postcolony but also that it is the means by which the citizenry assert their citizenship, structure their space, and perform democracy. I use the phrase “proximate thuggery” in two ways: first, to broaden the commonplace definition of thuggery as violent antisocial behavior which does not hold up in many postcolonial states where there seems no line separating the violent from the non-violent, where the insidiously violent masquerades as non-violent; and second, to signal the quotidian nature of dissent and therefore refocus attention on those manifestations of thuggery even in corridors of power. If the purpose of critical cultural studies is to understand a problem from its roots in order to suggest useful solutions, it seems fitting to pay attention to everyday, non-spectacular forms of dissent—for, among other reasons, attention to overt forms of dissent isolates them as anomalies and leads to inadequate solutions.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"89 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138600358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Violence-as-Norm in the Postcolony","authors":"Mathias Iroro Orhero, Chikezirim Nwoke","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, we explore forms of statist violence in both colonial and postcolonial contexts to underscore it as a constant in a postcolonial location like Nigeria. In addition to exploring how statist violence works, we also position civic dissent as a strategy employed in the colony and postcolony to confront statist violence. Our theorization of “violence-as-norm” is motivated by earlier ideas like the works of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, Tejumola Olaniyan’s “postcolonial incredible,” Toyin Falola’s views on violence within Nigerian history, and Achille Mbembe’s notions of banality and vulgarity in the postcolony. Our paper engages with Peter Omoko’s Majestic Revolt to demonstrate how “violence-as-norm” mediates colonial violence and civic dissent. Furthermore, by close-reading Chiedozie Omeje’s “When Cowards Win,” we explore postcolonial forms of violence through the EndSARS movement against police brutality in Nigeria to demonstrate how civic dissent is performed and ruptured in the contemporary moment. Ultimately, our research positions the Fanonist category of violence as a way to imagine the inherent coloniality of postcolonial nation-states, thereby extending the critique of the nation-form in postcolonial studies.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138600804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dramatic Dissent in Wole Soyinka’s Metaphysical Play Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) and Biyi Bandele’s Netflix Adaptation Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman (2022)","authors":"Hannah Pardey","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Approaching the theme of this special issue as a dramatic structure, the contribution investigates the representation of dissenting practices in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Biyi Bandele’s Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman. First published in 1975, Soyinka’s metaphysical play dramatises the events surrounding the eponymous protagonist Elesin Oba who, according to Yoruba cosmology, must follow the king in death to ensure harmony between this world and the next. Questioning both metaphysical and Marxist readings of the play, I argue that its employment of ritual as a dramaturgical device functions to explore the intricate reasons for failed leadership in post-independence Nigeria. This re-reading of Soyinka’s classic is informed by its recent screen adaptation, Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman, which was co-produced by Ebonylife Films and Netflix and directed by the late Nigerian playwright and filmmaker Biyi Bandele. Reinforcing new Nollywood’s budding relationship with Netflix and its accompanying globalisation, Bandele’s movie appropriates the play’s dramatic structure of dissent on the levels of cinematography and editing, mise-en-scène and sound, inviting its transnational viewers to consider past and present manifestations of dissent as a means of managing and envisioning possible solutions to contemporary conflicts. The conclusion stresses that the ritual form presents a flexible device to interrogate historically specific power relations and encourage distinct generations of audiences to imagine their forms, causes, and alternatives; whereas Soyinka’s play suggests that these alternatives rest on the capabilities of the educated middle classes, Bandele’s movie constructs more diversified audiences which may settle for its consoling or dissenting aesthetics, respectively.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"117 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138599703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ecobordering","authors":"M. N. Okolie, Ogochukwu Ukwueze","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05402006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05402006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Considering the literary response to the environmental crisis in the Niger Delta, it is observable that most critics of the literary arts on the Niger Delta homogenise the effects of the environmental problem, rather than focusing on particular groups of ecological subjects. These critics universalise environmental discourse, thereby overlooking more silenced and marginalised ecological subjects and subverting environmental justice. Using Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow, this study responds to the need to individualise the effect of environmental degradation by focusing on Niger Delta women who are both culturally and environmentally constrained. It combines border theories and ecofeminism to pay detailed attention to the literary representation of women’s precarious positionality, a situation of both spatial and symbolic vulnerability. It also explores women’s reception of and interaction with the polluted environment, given that the locations of degradation (the farms and freshwater), according to African culture, are gender-sensitive spaces and that African rural women mostly depend on farming and water for household work. Lastly, this paper examines women’s response to the violence of environmental pollution, thereby underscoring agency and visibility for women in connection with environment.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"96 21","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138599893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Unwritten","authors":"Pralini Naidoo","doi":"10.1163/18757421-05401007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05401007","url":null,"abstract":"For many years, having searched for the foods with which I had grown up within the pages of published recipe books, I realised that there was a lack of written representation around what I had understood as ancestral foods. Neither could I find the voices of the mothers and grandmothers who had fed our bodies and spirits. Through the lens of Indian indenture, a colonial system of servitude that had introduced my ancestors to South Africa, I attempt to understand why. While published recipe books offer multiple readings, they are also powerful forms of knowledge production, contributing to narrow formulations of identity. Power dictates what is published and how. By exploring how recipes live beyond words on the page, I suggest that the possibility exists to revisit hidden food narratives while recognising the creativity, ingenuity, and adaptability of many women, who are usually rendered invisible within food texts. Through poetry, story, and my mother’s handwritten recipe book, I search for my mother and the taste of home.","PeriodicalId":35183,"journal":{"name":"Matatu","volume":"152 12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139211954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}