Politics on Egyptian Stage: Agitprop in Salah Abdel Sabour’s Play The Tragedy of Al-Hallag (Published)
Political theatre is as old as theatre itself. A number of serious political plays exist in Classic Greek theatre, like Antigone (441 BC) by Sophocles and Lysistrata by Aristophanes (performed in classical Athens in 411 BC). Shakespeare also presented various political plays likes Julius Caesar (1599) based on true events from Roman history, and Coriolanus (written between 1505-1608) based on the life of the legendary Roman leader Coriolanus. Moreover, Bertolt Brecht contributed to political theatre, especially through his play The Resistible Rise of Urturo Ui (1941) which allegorizes the rise of Hitler to power and depicts the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster who cruelly disposes of his opposition. The German theatre director and producer Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who is one of the pioneers of modern political theatre in the west, emphasized the socio-political content of drama and highlighted – in the background of the events – the effect of politics on individuals. Moreover, in the late 20th century several angry political shows enabled black authors to gain a foothold in creating successful musical theatre as Melvin van Peebles’s Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), and the musical revue staged in 1971 Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope by Micki Grant. Such plays combine a considerable amount of entertainment with political messages.
Keywords: Agitprop, Al-Hallag, Egyptian stage, Politics, Salah Abdel Sabour’s play, tragedy
Niaja No Dey Carry Last: Pius Adesanmi and the Complexity of a Nation in Progress (Published)
Over the years Nigerian writers have consistently sustained the relationship between literature and politics. They perceptively engaged this connection since the colonial era, with the stages of the nation’s political development at the centre of the discourse. The reason is not farfetched; literature is a reflection of the environment in which it evolves. A writer’s ideology is shaped by the society and bears witness to its humanity. As imaginative as art is, it is the expression of a larger background: every work of literature signifies a time, place and people. An indication of the importance of art in the society is exposed in the way literature has remained part of the progress of man and his surroundings. Thus, one of the fundamental arguments of literature in exploring this relationship is to establish the fact that Literature and politics are intrinsically tied. Therefore, this paper investigates the concept of national and sustainable development in Pius Adesanmi’s NAIJA NO DEY CARRY LAST. It explores the use of satire to create political awareness and national memory. Furthermore, this paper scrutinizes the growth of Nigeria’s democracy and the commitment of successive leaders. It arrivals at the conclusion that NAIJA NO DEY CARRY LAST provides evidence that retention of national memory guarantees hope for a recovered Nigeria of the future and attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Keywords: Memory., NAIJA NO DEY CARRY LAST, Nigerian Literature, Politics, Satire, Sustainable Development Goals
Lexicalisation as a Tool for Ideological Expression in News (Published)
The use of critical discourse analysis has led to the development of a different approach to the understanding of media messages. This study focusses on the deployment of lexical items by the broadcast media to portray the political actors in Osun State, South-western Nigeria. The data for the study centred on politics and are derived from selected radio news of Osun State Broadcasting Corporation, Nigeria. The selection of data was done by purposive sampling and cover the period from 2007 to 2010. This period of time was very significant because of the political activities as a result of the elections in Osun State, Nigeria. A content analysis of the data was carried out at the surface and deep levels using the linguistic approach and critical discourse analysis to bring out the ideologies and the underlying meanings embedded in the texts. The analysis reveals that the news items feature lexical choices projecting positive self-presentation of the ruling political party and negative other-presentation of the opponent.
Keywords: : lexical choices, Ideology, Politics, broadcast media
Liminality and Regeneration in Wahome Mutahi’s the House of Doom, Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera and Moraa Gitaa’s the Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (Published)
This paper is a critical interrogation of three Kenyan HIV/AIDS novels: Wahome Mutahi’s The House of Doom (2004), Francis Imbuga’s Miracle of Remera (2004) and Moraa Gitaa’s The Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (2008). It examines how the enactments of illness by the diseased characters in the three texts relate to their quest for meaning. The paper has drawn primarily on the existentialist notions advanced by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the Foucauldian postulations on the politics of and the care of the self and de Certeau’s thoughts on liminality. These paradigms have the self as a shared feature and are useful in focusing the analysis to the individuality of the diseased subjects and their relationship with themselves and the complex social world around them. The paper emanates from the need to foster understanding of the ontological issues surrounding AIDS experience.
Keywords: Aid, Liminalit, Meaning, Ontological, Politics
Contemporary Social, Political and Religious Satire under the Silent Penetration of Poverty and Class Discrimination: An Exploration on Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ (Published)
“The White Tiger” is a Man Booker Prize (2008) winning book is written by the great Indian-Australian writer, Aravind Adiga. This article lets us know how the class discrimination is engulfing the Post-Colonial Indian Society under the silent penetration of poverty and corruption and how the human morality is decaying under the religious and political unrests. Here, the narrator and protagonist, Balram Halwai, struggles against his lower class society from the very initial time of his life. His life undergoes with serious sufferings from economical solvency because of being in the lower Hindu cast. He senses the tortures of the elite class people towards the deprived poor. He witnessed the deaths of many dreams in a poor family. He observes it as a “Rooster Coop” that stands for the extreme poverty where the people below the social margin remain in a great danger and never rebel against the society as they have no wealth and power. He scrutinizes the huge corruptions in politics and in every class he went through. As a driver, he has had a great chance to discover the great Indian corruptions on the root levels of cities and towns. His mind always rebels against those terminations but he is to go on as to be alive in his ways of being an enlightened person. Nevertheless, he takes in a great loss of pain but what he has gained at last is nothing but dishonesty and rampancy of corruption because all his perceptions are only for earthly happiness of money. What he got after killing Mr. Ashok and stealing his money (700,000 Rs.) is really a mystery to the readers. Significantly, Aravind Adiga has tried to rectify the human society by upholding the above facts that are running on ahead.
Keywords: Corruption, Discrimination and Nihilism, Economics, Politics, Poverty, Satire, Sufferings
THE SOCIO-POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SOME OF THE EPISODES IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S NOVEL “A MAN OF THE PEOPLE (Review Completed - Accepted)
The purpose of this Article is bring to the fore how Chinua Achebe has used A Man of the people to condemn the societal belief that politics is the best avenue for making money, which often lead people into siphoning money from the government purse unnecessarily when they finally have access to the mantle of power. Achebe has used different episodes in A Man of the People to show Clearly African people`s thinking about the political terrain, seeing it as an avenue to enrich themselves, with the Society adoring Corrupt politicians abnormally. This research work aims at exploring the implications of Achebe`s focus in putting in place this novel.
Keywords: Belief, Corruption, Episodes, Literary, Politics, Society