In Search of the Transformative Imaginary: Literary Representations of Non-State Violence in the Globalized Postcolony

Abstract

Though revolutionary violence and the violence of the dispossessed gained a liberatory valence in its theorization during the anticolonial era by a wide range of writers, including Frantz Fanon, the liberatory aspects of such violence have diminished after decolonization. In contradistinction to the anticolonial view of the violence of the dispossessed, dominant discourse, as Priyamvada Gopal asserts, “assumes, rather than argues for, its fundamental unacceptability.” Yet a critical analysis of the globalized postcolonial world reveals a continuity between the economic and political dispossession, and excessive forms of state violence of colonial history and the postcolonial present. Simultaneously, the emergence of new forms of violence stemming from the dispossessed is increasingly evident in individual acts of terror and in moments of communal inter-ethnic conflict, the violence of which, though inextricably linked to historical and political processes of dispossession, is no longer mobilized by the transformative politics which drove the militancy of anticolonial movements. In order critically to examine this impasse between a discursive insistence on non-violence on the one hand and the persistence of colonial forms of state and economic violence in the postcolony on the other, this essay analyzes literature arising in response to the 2007/2008 post-election violence in Kenya, focusing on representations of the Mau Mau Uprising which, I argue, evacuate the liberatory potential of resistant, non-state violence. While acknowledging the validity of non-violent approaches in general, and in the specific project of healing in response to the PEV, this essay argues contemporary Kenyan literature ascribes to the discursive assumption which delegitimizes the violence of the dispossessed, without imagining resistance or alternative transformative strategies that might demonstrably redress the material and political problems faced by the dispossessed in Kenya after independence which give rise to the PEV and which emerges as imperative to avoid such violence in the future.