Satirizing bureaucratic failure and urban dysfunction in Faith Ben-Daniels’s A Quarter Past Midnight (2013)
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Abstract
African postcolonial cities are frequently rendered in literature as spaces where colonial administrative structures persist, shaping urban life through delay, confusion, and institutional alienation long after independence. However bureaucratic satire within African urban fiction remains insufficiently theorized, and A Quarter Past Midnight (2013) has not received sustained scholarly attention through a postcolonial urban lens, leaving its critique of institutional dysfunction underexplored. This study investigates Faith Ben-Daniels’s A Quarter Past Midnight (2013) as a satirical exploration of bureaucratic failure and urban dysfunction within this postcolonial context. It further aims to examine how the novel uses satire to expose the absurdity and inefficiency of postcolonial bureaucratic institutions, and how ordinary urban dwellers navigate the jurisdictional confusion these institutions produce. The study adopts a qualitative close reading methodology, purposively selecting key scenes of bureaucratic encounter in the novel for textual analysis. It is anchored in Postcolonial Urban Theory, which reads the African city as a site where colonial administrative legacies continue to structure institutional power and everyday experience. Using this theoretical lens, the study analyzes how the novel’s satirical techniques render the city itself as both a physical and institutional terrain of postcolonial contestation. The findings reveal that the novel’s satire operates as a pointed critique of bureaucratic structures inherited from colonial governance, while also depicting the resourcefulness and endurance of citizens caught within them. The study concludes that A Quarter Past Midnight (2013) makes a distinctive contribution to African urban satire by positioning bureaucratic dysfunction not as incidental detail but as the central site through which postcolonial identity and urban survival are enacted.
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