Glass Cases and Ancestral Graves: Negotiating the Cultural-Modernity Dialectic in Victor Dugga’s Gidan Juju

Abstract

This paper interrogates the tension between tradition and modernity in Victor S. Dugga’s Gidan Juju, centering on the contested fate of ancestral remains and the symbolic weight they carry in a postcolonial African society. The study employs a cultural–modernity dialectic framework to examine how the drama stages competing ideologies: the preservation of indigenous customs rooted in communal memory versus the imperatives of modernization and global museological practices. Through close textual analysis, the paper unpacks the interplay between sacred burial traditions, ancestral reverence, and the commodification of heritage within state-sanctioned cultural institutions. It argues that Gidan Juju dramatizes not merely a conflict, but an ongoing negotiation in which cultural identity is redefined under the pressures of modern governance, global visibility, and historical preservation. The work reveals how the African stage becomes a space for negotiating belonging, legitimacy, and the moral economy of memory in the twenty-first century.