Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of Kenya’s most important writers offers a lens for reading these resonances. His central argument in Decolonising the Mind is that colonial language is a tool of domination.

Separated by time, both Joyce and Ngugi are reconstructing cultural memory under colonial pressure and they represent two colonial experiences responding differently to same imperial language.

This lecture juxtaposes Joyce and Ngugi to explore how both writers represent colonial subjectivity, the politics of language, and the dignity of ordinary life, despite their different historical and geographical contexts.