The cybogre manifesto: time, utopia, and globality in Ngugi's 'Wizard of the crow'

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Periodical article

Title:	The cybogre manifesto: time, utopia, and globality in Ngugi's 'Wizard of the crow'
Author:	Macdonald, Ian P.
Year:	2016
Periodical:	Research in African Literatures (ISSN 0034-5210)
Volume:	47
Issue:	1
Pages:	57-75
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Kenya
Subjects:	novels literary criticism
About person:	Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1938-)
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v047/47.1.macdonald.pdf
Abstract:	This article contends that what differentiates 'Wizard of the crow' from Ngugi's earlier writings lies in the manner in which his populism has moved from the national to the global scale. Ngugi 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 Ngugi'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. Bibliogr., notes, ref, sum. [Journal abstract]