Sacrifice and Political Power: the African and Latin American Experience in Fiction (Guatemala, Colombia, Cote D'ivoire, Zaire, Congo, Guinea; Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ahmadou Kourouma, V. Y. Mudimbe, Williams Sassine).

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study of selected contemporary African and Latin American texts. It examines such texts as El Senor presidente (Asturias), El Otono del patriarca (Garc(')ia Marquez), Les Soleils des independances (Kourouma), La Vie et demie and Le Bel immonde (Mudimbe), and Le Jeune homme de sable (Sassine) to show how the writers of those texts, drawing from belief systems of their societies are able to rework them to create new worlds in which the rituals of sacrifice and myths of power assume new forms. As conceived and reworked in these texts, sacrifice loses its social function and becomes the means through which political figures such as el Patriarca, le Guide Providentiel, Martillimi Lopez, el Tohil-Presdiente, el Supremo Dictador, and Abdou cling to their position of power. These figures substitute themselves for the gods and therefore set themselves up as beneficiaries of the sacrifice. Their pseudo-sacred world that results is filled with terror and generalized violence; it is coincidentally a world in which even the sacrificers or beneficiaries may become victims of their own system. The dissertation examines indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial contexts that may help explain what Wole Soyinka has called "A Play of Giants".