The Corporation as Imperialist and Antagonist in Contemporary African Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT More powerful and influential than some smaller nations, multinational corporations exert a tremendous influence on the functioning of contemporary global society. From as far back as the dawn of capitalist modernity, proto-corporations furthered the ends of empire, bringing massive foreign populations and swathes of territory under economic and political control. This essay analyzes how recent works of sub-Saharan African fiction have conceptualized the corporation as functioning in a fundamentally imperialistic manner within the global system of neoliberal capitalism. In analyzing the novels How Beautiful We Were and Congo Inc., it considers to what extent these works see the operations of corporations within Africa as part of a long line of imperialistic exploitation of labor and resources stretching back to the days of the large European colonial empires, and to what extent these works see the machinations of the corporation as a novel socioeconomic phenomenon of our age of frenetic transnational flows of capital and information. In doing so it also asks how these novels envision possibilities of local-level resistance to these forms of corporate economic predation that threaten to stir up military conflict and despoil local ecosystems.