Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest | ||
| پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان | ||
| دوره 31، شماره 2، بهار 1405، صفحه 327-344 اصل مقاله (427.73 K) | ||
| نوع مقاله: مقاله علمی پژوهشی | ||
| شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.22059/jor.2026.415233.2851 | ||
| نویسنده | ||
| Qutaiba Saleh Fenjan* | ||
| Department of Journalism, Massmedia College, University of Thi-Qar, Nassiriya City. Iraq | ||
| 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 | ||
| مراجع | ||
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آمار تعداد مشاهده مقاله: 268 تعداد دریافت فایل اصل مقاله: 267 |
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