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- Title
The Cybogre Manifesto: Time, Utopia, and Globality in Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow.
- Authors
MACDONALD, IAN P.
- Abstract
This article contends that what differentiates Wizard of the Crow from Ngũgĩ's earlier writings lies in the manner in which his populism has moved from the national to the global scale. Ngũgĩ accomplishes this by figuring dystopia as comic rather than tragic, privileging the social body over the individual in a way that transcends limitations surrounding the nation-state. Focusing on the novel's incorporation of scientific idioms as well as on themes of temporal fixity, the article points to a restaging of Ngũgĩ's earlier, more provincial, representations of resistance through the incorporation of utopian dissociative features that make it structurally and politically allegorical and also futuristic without conforming to the obsession with the sovereign individual common to Western anti-utopias. The crux of this movement, I argue, occurs through the figure of the cybogre, a fusion of technology and myth that pits cosmic spiritual elements against the limits of human technical (re)creativity.
- Subjects
WIZARD of the Crow (Book); NGUGI wa Thiong'o, 1938-; UTOPIAS in literature; DYSTOPIAS in literature; IDIOMS
- Publication
Research in African Literatures, 2016, Vol 47, Issue 1, p57
- ISSN
0034-5210
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/reseafrilite.47.1.57