Paper long abstract:

Narratives about ethnic conflicts are dynamic conversations that create individual and collective meanings. They have political implications as well as cultural significance, identity as well as historical imaginaries through which the individual and the group appropriate symbols and erect simple memorials. While the stories continue to recreate shocking experiences of the past in the present, people at the same time employ them to develop new ways of ethnic knowledge and behaviour and as part of an adaptive strategy to remember who they are and in establishing their own identity. In turn this not only leads to ethnic (mis)information but also potentially expand the space of social violence. Exploring the theoretical ramifications of these, the study analyzes how such stories structurally configure ethnic selfhood and ethnic otherness, and establish collective self-affirmation, common experience and transform protracted conflicts. Specifically, it draws from discourse and phenomenological inquiries to contend with the discontinuous effects of popular stories of conflicts in the aggravation and transformation of protracted ethno-political conflicts in Nigeria. The study is framed in terms of how the discourse and phenomenality of song-tales, folklore, metaphors, anecdotes, proverbs, folkhumour and ballads provide “conflict categories” and “violence machines” in Nigeria’s perennial problem of ethnic violence. The study reads the genres as texts. It argues that they constitute critical arsenal in the exacerbation of conflicts as they perform images, meanings and consciousness that shape and sharpen ethnic subjectivity and which involve profound subtleties that lead almost immediately to the complex role of language, memory and identity in Nigeria’s ethnic conflict experiences.