Marecheran postmodernism: Mocking the bad joke of “African Modernity”

Abstract

Summary This discussion begins by setting up a critique of the modernisation project of the West as closely entwined with territorial expansionism and the development of racial arrogance ‐ with reference to a range of theorists. The role of modernism (in literature) is recognised as simultaneously an exposure of territorial and racial power factors at work in the European modernisation project, and as (to some extent) complicit in them. The text used here to exemplify the paradoxical role of European modernism is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Since Marechera in carnivalesque fashion parodies Conrad's novella in the opening pages of his novel Black Sunlight, discussing this text introduces the topic of Marechera's particular kind of postmodernism with its focus on the modernisation project, in the African context, as a form of betrayal. The rest of the essay examines The Black Insider ‐ a novel of debate in which the displacement of African intellectuals is addressed in a similar style of grotesque mockery blended with lamentation ‐ and (briefly) The House of Hunger‐ where Kafkaesque perspectives are used to effect cultural‐political analysis of a colonised society. The essay concludes by citing Gertrude Stein's sarcastic exposure of the type of art that supports Western complacency and power validation. Notes illustrate and expand a number of the arguments in the essay.