Beyond Self-Recognition: Fragmented Subjectivity in Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red and African Psycho

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The following article examines the treatment of subjectivity in Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red and African Psycho from an African postmodernist perspective. My argument is that this Afrodiasporic writer from the Republic of Congo localizes in a postcolonial context the postmodernist motif of fragmented subjectivity in order to critique the psychological effects of enforced modernity on the protagonists of the two novels, namely Massala-Massala and Grégoire Nabomakoyo, respectively. In developing this argument, I show how the former’s immigrant experiences in Paris and the latter’s traumatic childhood in the fictitious Congolese city of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot reduce their respective selves to a flux of personalities. In other words, the two protagonists display conflicting personalities and so their selfhood, indeed their self-perception, is always in a process of perpetual deferment, uncertainty, instability, and indeterminacy. As I proceed, it will become clear that their fragmented subjectivities manifest in self-contradictions and ambivalent adoption of criminal identities.