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Abstract
In this paper, I rethink thuggery, an overt form of dissent, as a spatial structural frame. Through a close reading of everyday forms of thuggery in Nigeria, exemplified in literary, musical, and photographic forms, I argue that not only is thuggery ubiquitous in the African postcolony but also that it is the means by which the citizenry assert their citizenship, structure their space, and perform democracy. I use the phrase “proximate thuggery” in two ways: first, to broaden the commonplace definition of thuggery as violent antisocial behavior which does not hold up in many postcolonial states where there seems no line separating the violent from the non-violent, where the insidiously violent masquerades as non-violent; and second, to signal the quotidian nature of dissent and therefore refocus attention on those manifestations of thuggery even in corridors of power. If the purpose of critical cultural studies is to understand a problem from its roots in order to suggest useful solutions, it seems fitting to pay attention to everyday, non-spectacular forms of dissent—for, among other reasons, attention to overt forms of dissent isolates them as anomalies and leads to inadequate solutions.
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Adéẹ̀kọ́, Adélékè. Arts of Being Yorùbá: Divination, Allegory, Tragedy, Proverb, Panegyric (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).
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Adeniyi, Mubaidat Adenrele & Mopelola Olugbemisola Omoegun. “Rehabilitative Strategies as Template for Addressing the Adjustment Problems of Area Boys and Girls in the Lagos Metropolis,” Journal of Psychosocial Research 8.2 (2013): 157–165.
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Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela. “Shuffering and Shmiling,” Shuffering and Shmiling (Lagos: Coconut, 1978).
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Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28 (1984): 125–133.
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Chatterjee, Amal. Representations of India, 1740–1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).
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Diabate, Naminata. Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
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Dow, Dawn Maries. “The Deadly Challenges of Raising African American Boys: Navigating the Controlling Image of the ‘Thug,’” Gender and Society 30.2 (2016): 161–188.
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Freeman, Joanne B. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
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Gadinger, Frank, Christopher Smith Ochoa & Taylan Yildiz. “Resistance or Thuggery? Political Narratives of Urban Riots,” Narrative Culture 6.1 (2019): 88–111.
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Gbogi, Tosin. “When Power Swallows Its Grace: Poetics, Politics, and Performance in Postcolonial Nigeria.” Folklore 132.1 (2021): 268–289.
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Hadiz, Vedi. Localizing Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2010).
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Idakwoji, Salami Pious & Salisu Ojonemi Paul, “An Empirical Description of Political Thuggery and Democratization in Kogi State Nigeria, 2003–2010,” Ife PsychologIA 22.1 (2014): 202–217.
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Inden, Ronald B. Imagining India (1990; repr., Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2000).
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Kaiser, Matthew. “Editor’s Introduction,” in Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor, ed. Matthew Kaiser (1839; repr., USA: University Readers, Inc., 2010).
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Mackey, Nathaniel. “Breath and Precarity: The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Politics,” Myung Mi Kim & Christianne Miller (eds.), Poetics and Precarity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018): 1–30.
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Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
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Moten, Fred. The Little Edges (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014).
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“Nollywood Dreams, Lagosian Realities: A Bibliography for the Capital of West Africa,” The Metropole. https://themetropole.blog/2019/04/01/nollywood-dreams-lagosian-realities-a-bibliography-for-the-capital-of-west-africa/, acc. 28 October 2022.
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Olaniyan, Tejumola, ed. State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).
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Olaniyan, Tejumola. “African Urban Garrison Architecture: Property, Armed Robbery, Para-capitalism,” in State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings, ed. Tejumola Olaniyan (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017): 291–308.
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Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
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Onuzo, Chibundu. Welcome to Lagos (New York: Catapult, 2018).
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Oxford English Dictionary, “Thug,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2019), https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/view/Entry/201476?rskey=GL3FlA&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid, acc. 27 February 2022.
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Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
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Quayson, Ato. Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
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Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
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Simone, AbdouMaliq. “The Uninhabitable? In between Collapsed Yet Still Rigid Distinctions.” Cultural Politics 12.2 (2016): 135–154.
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Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
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Simone, AbdouMaliq. Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).
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Smiley, CalvinJohn & David Fakunle. “From ‘brute’ to ‘thug’: The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26.3–4 (2016): 350–366.
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Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975).
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Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or, Life among the Lowly (1852; repr., Cambridge, MA: John Harvard Library, 2009).
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Taylor, Philip Meadows. Confessions of a Thug, ed. Matthew Kaiser (1839; repr., USA: University Readers, 2010).
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Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Umeh, Charles S. “Assessment of Personality Characteristics of Lagos ‘Area Boys,’” Ife PsychologIA 21.2 (2013): 27–34.
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Wagner, Kim A. “The Deconstructed Stranglers: A Reassessment of Thuggee,” Modern Asian Studies 38.4 (2004): 931–963.
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Wagner, Kim A. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in the Early Nineteenth-Century India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
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Search for other papers by Tolulope Akinwole in
Current site
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Abstract
In this paper, I rethink thuggery, an overt form of dissent, as a spatial structural frame. Through a close reading of everyday forms of thuggery in Nigeria, exemplified in literary, musical, and photographic forms, I argue that not only is thuggery ubiquitous in the African postcolony but also that it is the means by which the citizenry assert their citizenship, structure their space, and perform democracy. I use the phrase “proximate thuggery” in two ways: first, to broaden the commonplace definition of thuggery as violent antisocial behavior which does not hold up in many postcolonial states where there seems no line separating the violent from the non-violent, where the insidiously violent masquerades as non-violent; and second, to signal the quotidian nature of dissent and therefore refocus attention on those manifestations of thuggery even in corridors of power. If the purpose of critical cultural studies is to understand a problem from its roots in order to suggest useful solutions, it seems fitting to pay attention to everyday, non-spectacular forms of dissent—for, among other reasons, attention to overt forms of dissent isolates them as anomalies and leads to inadequate solutions.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 719 | 335 | 60 |
| Full Text Views | 19 | 7 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 35 | 12 | 0 |
