Unmasking communism: Ayi Kwei Armah, black Marxism, and the cultural turn, 1967-1984

Abstract

ABSTRACT Can the repudiation of Eurocentric Marxism and embrace of Afrocentrism in Ayi Kwei Armah’s essays explain his shift from writing realist to historical novels? Contextualizing Armah’s work in relation to the global cultural turn in the second half of the twentieth century, this article understands his critique of racial capitalism and program of re-Africanization as a black Marxism. It then explains Armah’s embrace of the form of the historical novel in Two Thousand Seasons via a reading of Fragments, which allegorizes a key political and aesthetic contradiction: the changes in culture and consciousness requisite for decolonization cannot occur within the established structures of representation. Reading Armah’s historical novels through the black Marxism of his essays indicates the horizons of his work for Marxist approaches to African literature today and remains important for understanding the legacy of revolutionary Fanonism.