A new academic chapter by Alice Jossy Kyobutungi Tumwesigye reads two novels by Mary Karooro Okurut as stories about gender and as performances of power. The chapter shows how Okurut’s fiction presents public life as a stage where gender roles are acted out, tested and reshaped.
The chapter, titled Hybrid Voices and Embodied Politics: Gender, Performativity, and Postcolonial Negotiation in Mary Karooro Okurut’s ‘The Invisible Weevil’ and ‘Child of a Delegate’, is published in the “New Era of African Development” series by the Centre for Democracy, Research and Development. It is available online at https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11951/2299
The study compares the two novels using feminist performance theory, postcolonial performativity and hybridity. It explains that although the books are prose narratives, they are deeply performative. Their storytelling, their dialogue and their scenes of political spectacle, ritual speech and public gender roles all work like acts on a stage.
Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, the chapter shows how Okurut sets her stories in the in-between spaces of postcolonial society, where traditional ideas about men and women meet modern political and social institutions. In The Invisible Weevil, politics becomes a contested ground where women face corruption and patriarchy while still claiming a voice as citizens. Child of a Delegate turns to power across generations, showing how power, masculinity and femininity are performed within postcolonial systems of government.
The author notes that music and dance are not central in these novels. Rituals, political rallies and community gatherings carry that weight instead, showing how identity and power are displayed in everyday life. The chapter concludes that Okurut presents the postcolonial public sphere as a stage where gender identities are never settled but are continually negotiated and reimagined.
The publication adds to wider conversations on African heritage and links literary studies with performance and cultural studies. It offers scholars in all three fields a shared way to discuss gender, power and performance.
The full chapter can be accessed at https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11951/2299