Transnationalism in recent fictionalized texts on East Africa

Abstract

Recent fictionalized texts on East Africa and on the political turmoil that began just before the 1994 Rwanda genocide, later morphing across the Great Lakes, provide insightful contrasts to the scholarship on transnationalism. Concentrating on two agents that foreground these alterities, ‘the soldier who refuses’ and ‘the refugee’, the article disaggregates this region’s heterotopias. The argument is that, in their walking away from civil wars in East Africa to Southern Africa, these subjects provide an original set of lexical items to interpret new but fragile peoples who break free from the nation state.At the same time, the unique grammar broadens the methodology for considering the ‘Indian Ocean’ as a topic that recurs in studies on East Africa. In this reading, the discussion works with the cultural studies concept of ‘walking’, as its politics of terra firma centres on guerrilla tactics and on how they weaken the postcolony.The first part of the article attempts a review of the cartographies of East Africa.The second section closely considers how the representations of these sets of heterotopias in select fiction on East Africa render this region transnational.