علی سلامی

With the advent of the 21st century, the way characters and identities interact under the influence of dominant powers has brought a new world into existence, a world dubbed by Manuel Castells as the ‘Fourth World’. Within the Castellsian theoretical matrix of the Fourth World and politics of identity, the present study seeks to investigate the true nature of the futuristic world Margaret Atwood hascreated in the MaddAddam trilogy. The trilogy literarily reflects a global crisis that ultimately leads to dystopia and the destruction of the human race: what remains of humanity is a small group of survivors who must struggle to conserve what remains of humanity. Identity as the main determining factor in the Fourth World represents personal and public privileges, characteristics, and means of differentiating oneself from others. The Fourth World and its political peculiarities reflect contemporary powers, i.e. the power of the network society, network communication and media. Humankind, in this wheel, is just a toy in the hands of an intelligence broker. What exactly happens to human and semi-human characters in Atwood’s trilogy is the result of Fourth World structures andvalues, and how they shape and reconstruct identities to lead the world toward fabricated truths and values, and terminate in dystopia.

There have been major changes in African contemporary literature. It depicts the decentralized realities that Africans experience in the increasingly interconnected world going beyond singular narratives. The devolution of ethnic cultures and the rise of a generation struggling with fragmented identities are reflected in the emergence of new African voices both within and outside of the continent. One of the best examples of this trend is the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie crafts a story that skillfully combines disparate cultural elements—Nigerian and American—while providing a nuanced examination of self-identity and the feeling of being other through the journey of Ifemelu and Obinze. This article centers on Adichie’s use of the idea of decentralized realities to illustrate the challenges faced by African migrants who have to reassess who they are in the face of societies that frequently marginalize their cultures. Americanah draws attention to the intricacy of cross-cultural encounters as well as the ongoing discussions and conflicts surrounding identity and belonging. In a world where borders—both physical and cultural—are always changing, the characters grapple with the idea of where they truly belong. The article explores how Adichie illustrates the psychological and emotional costs of navigating a world that does not always acknowledge their multiple identities by looking at their individual journeys. In the end, Adichie’s Americanah explores the complex realities of the diaspora in a profound way as a representative work of contemporary African literature. The book promotes empathy and a greater comprehension of the complexity of individuals torn between cultures by making the reader confront preconceived ideas about identity and belonging.  

This essay revisits Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, only to fracture the coherence of that figure within the colonial encounter. Elesin Oba’s suspended subjectivity is not a metaphysical lapse or a tragic misreading between cultural grammars; it is a colonial deformation of ritual legibility, where the sacred and the abject no longer oppose but cohabit. The British interruption of Yoruba ritual suicide enacts more than cultural interference: it inaugurates a “state of exception” in which the suspension of indigenous law reasserts imperial sovereignty. Yet Soyinka’s dramaturgy exceeds Agamben’s juridico-political logic. Elesin is not merely abandoned by law but saturated by competing orders of ritual cosmology and colonial biopolitics that overdetermine his body. His death, once a consecrated passage, becomes a foreclosure of sacrifice itself as a recognizable form. In staging this impasse, Soyinka does not illustrate Agamben’s paradigm; he displaces it. What emerges is a sacrificial subject fractured between ritual investiture and colonial apprehension, whose interrupted body is left neither sanctified nor redeemed, but suspended in the epistemic violence of imperial modernity.