International Journal of Art and Art History

‘All Art is Propaganda’: The Politics of Gender (Mis)Representation in Kuku’s and Ugonna’s Dialogic Narratives
Ekikereobong Aniekan USORO

Abstract
The interaction of voices in textual interpretations does not exclusively take place within a single text but can be extrapolated to two or more literary texts, and this paper examines Kuku‟s Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad and Ugonna‟s Who Drove Nearly All Lagos Men Mad? as propaganda tools used for gender (mis)representation. Framed by the critical theory of Mikhail Bakhtin‟s dialogism, it is revealed that a common thread connects all the stories in Kuku‟s text: female experiences with often inconsiderate or manipulative men. It is further discovered that Ugonna‟s collection of short stories does not prioritise focus on the madness but on the projection of women as pathogenetic agents of this supposed madness. Therefore, Ugonna‟s collection of short stories is not necessarily a counter-narrative to Kuku‟s text but an attempt to justify the madness of Lagos men so projected in Kuku‟s collection of short stories, thereby posing more as an instrument of complementarity than that of polarity.

Full Text: PDF       DOI: 10.15640/ijaah.v12a4