Epic Aesthetics in Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s the Perfect Nine and the Contemporary Human Crises

This study explores the significance of the epic genre as appropriated by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in The Perfect Nine (2020). It examines how the author repositions the epic as a vessel of pre-capitalist wisdom and panacea to challenges of the contemporary digital era. Ngũgĩ employs the epic not only to re-institutionalize orality but also to respond to contemporary global crises, including the socio-cultural challenges posed by modern technological paradigms. Indigenous knowledge, as articulated through the epic, offers critical pathways toward mitigating these crises. In an era increasingly reliant on machine-driven communication and automated responses, this paper underscores the vital role of human empathy and cultural insight—qualities upheld by indigenous narratives amid machine-generated discourse. Guided by Ngũgĩ’s postcolonial philosophy of Globalectics and Victor Shklovsky’s formalist doctrines, the study emphasizes the necessity of reconnecting with ancestral wisdom to address contemporary human crises and bridge the missing link of human feeling and collaboration. Ultimately, this research contributes to scholarship on Ngũgĩ and postcolonial theory by establishing a critical dialogue between traditional oral aesthetics and modern technological reality.

Epic aesthetics, pre-capitalist wisdom, orality, African epic form, Artificial Intelligence, human crises

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