Abstract
This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated. Alternatively, it proposes that reading at the scale of the city offers a method for circumventing the elision of particularity which occurs when the nation, continent or globe are foregrounded in Western or Western-facing responses to these texts. The paper models what such a “scaled-down” reading might look like, attending to Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger (1978) and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006), and their intricate relationships to the urban spaces of Harare and Johannesburg, respectively. At stake in these analyses are opportunities to identify what Jacques Rancière terms dissensus, or political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened.
Highlights
This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated
Political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened
Of postcolonial fiction, who reads in the fictions of Ayi Kwei Armah, Wole Soyinka, and James Joyce, a dramatization of the struggles between “ethical selfhood and aesthetic freedom” and “the burden of national representation” (Esty 1999, p. 58). It is precisely by the assumption of the national frame when engaging in the interpretation of postcolonial literature that this struggle is overlooked, or brought to a premature conclusion; in what follows I mean to offer some notes on what becomes available to the critic when this national struggle is deferred in favour of a more local reading of urban space—with the understanding that this locality is only made meaningful by its specific embeddedness in a broader, and perhaps cosmopolitan, order
Summary
There is, at present, no robust and falsifiable theory of literature and public space. Rancière the essence of politics—but is still large enough to signify in broader, that is national and transnational, political, scholarly, and aesthetic, arenas This is not to ignore the close historical relationship between nation-building and literature in the wake of the struggle for African independence; as observed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the literature proceeding immediately out of the 1962 Makerere African Writers Conference, in the post-war world of national democratic revolutionary and anti-colonial liberation in. It is precisely by the assumption of the national frame when engaging in the interpretation of postcolonial literature that this struggle is overlooked, or brought to a premature conclusion; in what follows I mean to offer some notes on what becomes available to the critic when this national struggle is deferred in favour of a more local reading of urban space—with the understanding that this locality is only made meaningful by its specific embeddedness in a broader, and perhaps cosmopolitan, order
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