Mark Ferrara, English, publishes a peer-reviewed article in the journal Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (Johns Hopkins University Press) entitled “The Banality of Power in the Postcolony: Grifters, Tricksters, and Charlatans in Wole Soyinka’s Jero Plays.”
Abstract: Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote the Jero plays (The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis) thirteen years apart, and they shed light on the distress of a society in transition from colony to post-colony. Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes the post-colony as a site of high levels of corruption and appropriation of wealth by a ruling elite, a place where colonial rules linger and disrupt the workings of the state. Characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation defined by excess and a lack of proportion, in the post-colony, regimes of violence are prone to celebrating their own grandeur through macabre public events such as executions. Soyinka satirizes the protagonist of the Jero plays, a Machiavellian con artist who wraps himself in the cloak of Pentecostal Born-Again Christianity, for using blackmail and grift to secure a profitable spiritual monopoly on Bar Beach (to say prayers before and after each execution, to administer last rites, and to preach on the evils of crime). Through depictions of venality at every level of society, the Jero plays illustrate the difficulty of eradicating colonial legacies and demonstrate the deleterious effects of entrenched social and political corruption on daily life in the post-colony.
Contact: Mark S. Ferrara, English
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