Spectacle and Subversive Laughter in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

Abstract

"this paper examines the resistant spectator in Wizard of the Crow who refuses to be awed by state power and who, by laughing at the spectacular excess, inscribes a different meaning to the spectacles. The spectator essentially contests the state’s monopoly of meaning and its performance. It will be the argument in this paper that by answering back to the monologue of the spectacle through unscripted performances including silence where they are supposed to applaud, the average citizen subjects of the fictional state of Aburĩria engage in a dialogic exchange with the repressive state, contesting what Simon Gikandi has described elsewhere as the postcolonial state’s “monopoly of meanings, performances and discourses” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 38). Spectator laughter is a central component to this contestation."