Politics and poetics of (de)colonization in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the politics and poetics of (de)colonization that Namwali Serpell puts in place in her debut novel The Old Drift. It argues that she first of all addresses problematic (post)colonial representations particularly by explicitly referring to and debunking colonialist Percy M. Clark’s The Autobiography of an Old Drifter. Moreover, she allows for what Jacques Rancière has called a “re-configuration” of the “distribution of the sensible” by staging what Sara Ahmed has named “willful” characters who tackle the legacy of Scottish explorer David Livingstone, but who also live a historic moment for the Zambian nation, that of its decolonization/independence. Finally, it analyses the issues of Eurocentrism and Serpell’s willingness to decolonize the imaginary and the mind by focusing on alternative sources of historical knowledge: this enables both the characters and the readers to “wake up from the spell of Eurocentrism” in order to favour a form of “pluriversality”.