Writing resistance: Representations of Ken Saro-Wiwa and narratives of the Ogoni movement in Nigeria

This project takes the author Ken Saro-Wiwa as its focal point in order to explore the archive of narratives, including his own, that revolve around the Ogoni movement for economic, environmental and political rights in Nigeria. The dissertation argues that Saro-Wiwa's image is made to represent the movement in a variety of social discourses, frequently erasing the collective movement, and then deployed to serve those discourses: as democratic activist, as terrorist, as engaged intellectual. It also argues that, as an author and activist, he generally resists this reductionism by interweaving his own story with that of the Ogoni and by pointing beyond his own life's importance to the movement. This project suggests that, in an Internet age, textual contests over the meanings of indigenous resistance movements, which struggle against exploitation by multinational corporations and their national-government partners, may increasingly be addressed to international audiences, vying for readers who are also consumers, investors, and voters, and who can therefore affect the movement itself. Chapter One provides historical and biographical context for the project and attempts to assimilate the archive into a narrative of the Ogoni struggle. Chapter Two argues that mainstream U.S. news media representations of the movement empty it of its local history and draw on conventional literary paradigms of setting, conflict, and character to make sense of it for readers. Chapter Three analyzes how the Nigerian military government and Shell Oil worked to discredit Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni movement internationally from 1993 to 1997. Chapter Four examines how the Ogoni people, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, creatively use language and literature to conduct the Ogoni struggle and to create their own self-representations. Chapter Five argues that the Ogoni struggle continues partly through the multiple narratives and representations that have persisted and emerged after Saro-Wiwa's death. A brief epilogue points to other ways that the struggle continues, internationally but at the grassroots, and suggests that literary scholars and teachers can make strategically useful interventions in the struggle using literary critical tools.