Abstract
In this essay I intend to pursue a comparative reading of three postcolonial texts – in their intertextual and counter-canonical relationship with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) – that deal with the ethics, but also the aesthetics, of the relationship between humans and animals. By doing so, and with the help of the Kafkian critical apparatuses, particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s critical contribution (1986), which will be the core of this study, I will also examine the nexus between literature and the environment, with particular emphasis on waste, also taking into consideration the paradigms of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) and of écart (Jullien 2012). Kafka’s Curse (1997), by South African writer Achmat Dangor, Cockroach (2008) by Canadian-Lebanese Rawi Hage, and Blackass (2015) by Nigerian Igoni Barrett will be here analysed and scrutinised.
Highlights
: In questo saggio intendo proporre una lettura in chiave comparatistica di tre romanzi postcoloniali – in relazione intertestuale e contro-canonica rispetto a La metamorfosi (1915) di Franz Kafka – che affrontano l’etica, ma anche l’estetica, dell’interconnessione umano-animale
I would like to concentrate on three narratives in which an individual – through a Kafka-esque metamorphic process – is eventually equated to waste
In the postcolonial texts here analysed we find similar triangles: KAFKA Czechoslovakia, Prague DANGOR South Africa, Johannesburg HAGE Canada, Quebec, Montreal BARRETT Nigeria, Lagos
Summary
Czech, Yiddish White Jew > Black insect Afrikaans, Yiddish, English Oriental Black Muslim > White (European) Jew Lebanese, English/French Black Arab migrant > in white Montreal Yoruba, English Black Nigerian > White Nigerian. All the Kafka-esque characters speak more than one language: sometimes they do not speak one of the languages of the country, and the language they speak makes them more or less authentic in their metamorphosis, and determines their loyalty towards one specific ‘sovereignty’ Another paradigm selected by Deleuze and Guattari is the becoming-infra-human or becoming-animal, as a line of flight, a line of escape, as an alternative to remaining obedient, with a lowered head, remaining a bureaucrat, an inspector, a judge, a culprit. In the three Anglophone novels, the characters metamorphose into a different ethnic/ racial, religious and/or linguistic subject This becoming-other, allusively referred to as a becoming-cockroach – at least in two of the three novels –, implies a real deterritorialization, for the three protagonists are literally expelled and exiled from the family circle, the house, the city, the country. Kafka’s deterritoralization of German represents a particular strategy for dealing with this widespread postcolonial linguistic dilemma” (Bogue 1997: 105)
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