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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">BJCR</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title xml:lang="en">British Journal of Contemporary Research</journal-title>
        <abbrev-journal-title xml:lang="en">BJCR</abbrev-journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn>2979-8582</issn>
      <publisher>
        <publisher-name>Bexford Publishing Ltd</publisher-name>
        <publisher-loc><uri>https://bexfordpublishing.co.uk</uri></publisher-loc>
      </publisher>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">BEX_AUG_26_199</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.67693/BJCR-2AVPUJ9E</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group xml:lang="en" subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original Research Article</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title xml:lang="en">FROM CINEMATIC ABSURDITY TO STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE: BECKETTIAN AESTHETICS AND POSTCOLONIAL CONFLICT IN DAUDI ANGUKA&#039;S MVERA</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group content-type="author">
      <contrib corresp="yes">
        <name-alternatives>
          <name name-style="western" specific-use="primary">
            <given-names>Odundo Allan Stephen Otieno</given-names>
          </name>
        </name-alternatives>
        <email>kodundoallan@gmail.com</email>
        <bio xml:lang="en"><p>University of Nairobi, Kenya</p></bio>
      </contrib>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date date-type="pub" publication-format="epub">
        <day>10</day>
        <month>09</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>1</volume>
      <issue>4</issue>
      
      
      <pub-history>
        <event event-type="received">
          <event-desc>Received: <date date-type="received">
            <day>27</day>
            <month>08</month>
            <year>2026</year>
          </date></event-desc>
        </event>
        
        <event event-type="accepted">
          <event-desc>Accepted: <date date-type="accepted">
            <day>01</day>
            <month>09</month>
            <year>2026</year>
          </date></event-desc>
        </event>
      </pub-history>
      <permissions>
        <copyright-statement>Copyright (c) 2026 Odundo Allan Stephen Otieno</copyright-statement>
        <copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
        <license xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0">
          <license-p>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.</license-p>
        </license>
      </permissions>
      <abstract><p>Abstract
Contemporary African cinema has increasingly moved beyond conventional realism to explore fragmented histories, political disillusionment, trauma, displacement, and the psychological consequences of structural violence. Yet scholarship on African conflict cinema has tended to privilege historical realism and sociopolitical representation, while the potential of absurdist form to produce an alternative understanding of postcolonial experience remains comparatively underexamined. This paper examines Daudi Anguka&#039;s Mvera (2023) as a cinematic reconfiguration of absurdist aesthetics within a Kenyan postcolonial context. Rather than treating absurdity simply as a stylistic departure from realism, the article conceptualizes structural absurdity as a condition in which political, economic, and social contradictions become experienced by individuals as repetition, uncertainty, communicative breakdown, spatial confinement, and disrupted temporal coherence. Drawing on Beckettian aesthetics, postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and African film scholarship, the paper employs qualitative close textual and audiovisual analysis of the film. Particular attention is given to fragmented temporality, silence and minimal dialogue, spatial confinement, visual estrangement, repetition, characterization, and the relationship between historical memory and contemporary exploitation. The analysis argues that Mvera does not simply represent conflict as an external political event; it transforms conflict into an aesthetic and experiential condition. Mvera&#039;s entrapment within a system that disguises exploitation as opportunity, together with Thabiti&#039;s conversion of economic vulnerability into political power, produces a world in which ordinary categories of choice, progress, security, and freedom become unstable. The film&#039;s absurdist structures therefore reveal a deeper contradiction within postcolonial subjectivity: individuals are invited to pursue mobility and economic liberation while simultaneously being incorporated into systems that reproduce their vulnerability. The paper  concludes that Mvera reconfigures Beckettian aesthetic principles through specifically Kenyan social realities, demonstrating that absurdity can function not merely as an existential category but as a cinematic grammar for representing structural violence, postcolonial dislocation, and the persistence of unresolved historical contradictions.
Keywords: cinematic absurdity, structural violence, Beckettian aesthetics, Mvera, postcolonial cinema, trauma, repetition, Kenyan cinema</p></abstract>
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  </front>
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</article>