Resistance as constructive cultural world-making: re-imaging in Ugwo Ndi Ocha multimodal cultural performance

This paper theorizes constructive cultural world-making – the deliberate construction of alternative realities through performance, aesthetics, and meaning-making – as a framework for understanding resistance. Central to this framework is re-imaging – a visual-lyrical dialectic that simultaneously deconstructs colonial epistemic violence and constructs alternative realities grounded in Igbo epistemologies. Drawing on African decolonial scholarship and centering the Igbo cosmological principles of ndu (life force), chi (personal destiny), and an egalitarian ethos, I show how Ugwo Ndi Ocha enacts constructive cultural world-making through call-and-response, sonic layering, costuming, spatial arrangement, and alternating visualizations. The framework reframes resistance as generative rather than oppositional foregrounding what cultural practice creates rather than what it opposes.