Globalisation, Sex and Sexuality in Nigerian Literature: A Focus on Toni Kan's Ballad of Rage

ABSTRACT

Globalisation is the trend of increasing interaction between individuals, people and nations with a focus on increasing trade, ideas and culture. In recent times, literature tend to aid in the transmission of ideas, meanings and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is attained through the consumption of social cultures, which have been caused by migration, internet and popular culture media. This cultural circulation extends social relationships that cuts across national and regional borders.

In Africa the human sexuality is one sided, domineering and basically oppressive against the female gender. In this regard, Tamale (2011) reveals that African sexualities is primitive, exotic, rapacious, savage, bestial, lascivious.... African people’s sexualities being “read directly into their physical attributes”. In view of this, colonial construction showcased the African men as infantile and in thrall to rampant sexual appetites, unguided sexual behaviours and body decorum. African were however forced to accept the Western sexual law and discipline and channel their sexual desire towards the preservation of life and the increase of the population (White, 1990). This became problematic because their sexual behaviours have been derogated, exaggerated, and exoticised by colonial powers, and then held up by those same powers as examples of their inferiority and justification for their standards (king, 2002), which they tend to use as a reformative tool against sexual subjugation complex of patriarchal ideology and gender divisions (Nzegwu, 2011). Recently many African writers now tend to accept the tag by Western standards that places their literature with less value disregarding the content. This has led to the in-cooperation of Western practices for global validation. On this basis, this paper focuses on Toni Kan’s Ballad of Rage which captures the connect among cultures which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities as it reveals the concept of sex and sexuality and the writer’s conventional portrayal of homosexuality- a Western decadence, unlike the African (Nigerian) stereotype. The paper concludes that globalisation has created cultural flexibility and diffusion which allows the spread of individual cultural items such as ideas, style, and others.