African literature and the world system : dystopian fiction, collective experience, and the postcolonial condition
1995; Indiana University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1527-2044
Autores Tópico(s)Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
ResumoPostcolonial writers, actively engaged in the construction of cultural identities for their new societies, often include strong utopian elements in their work. On the other hand, actual experience in the postcolonial world has been anything but utopian. It thus may not be entirely surprising that recent postcolonial literature has taken a powerfully dystopian turn. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in African fiction, where works containing strong dystopian features have been produced by authors as diverse as Somalia's Nuruddin Farah (Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship), Kenya's Ngiigi wa Thiong'o (Devil on the Cross), Senegal's Ousmane Sembene (The Last of the Empire), Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born), the Congo's Henri Lopes (The Laughing Cry), Ethiopia's Hama Tuma (The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor), and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannah) and Wole Soyinka (Season ofAnomy). Of course, Western imaginative literature has also taken a decidedly dystopian turn in the twentieth century, but these African dystopian fictions differ from their European counterparts in certain important ways. In many ways, dystopian fiction has become a paradigmatic expression of the Western imagination in the twentieth century, a fact that poses significant problems (and opportunities) for African writers who seek to explore their own specific cultural situations within this genre. In particular, African writers of dystopian fiction face special complications in their attempts to explore new cultural identities within a quintessentially bourgeois form that seems inherently inimical to the utopian imagination. The difficulties faced by African writers of dystopian fiction are representative of those faced by African novelists in general, who must often strain against the generic characteristics of the fundamentally bourgeois form within which they write. In this sense, African writers have much in common with African-American writers, feminist writers, leftist writers, and all others who would seek to contribute to the development of cultural identities that escape the dominance of bourgeois ideology while writing within genres traditionally informed by that ideology. Noting the difficulties faced by American proletarian writers of the 1930s, who attempted to construct effective anti-bourgeois literature within the constraints of the traditionally bourgeois generic form of the novel, Barbara Foley
Referência(s)