Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rogues in the Postcolony: Chris Abani's <em>GraceLand</em> and the Petro-Picaresque

2015; Indiana University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/globalsouth.9.2.02

1932-8656

Stacey Balkan,

African history and culture studies

The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the internally displaced persons who Mike Davis chronicles in his Planet of Slums (2006). This particular rogue lives in the shadows of a new “lettered city”—an imperialist fantasy made possible by the discovery of petrol, if not silver and gold. His tale deploys such picaresque signatures as hunger and privation to critique and expose the real economic consequences of persons displaced by companies like Shell or Texaco-Chevron, not to mention mining companies across the Global South. Rife with moments of Swiftian abjection, Chris Abani’s picaresque novel GraceLand (2004) is an exemplar of the form. It sutures corporeal depictions of life in Maroko—a slum community on the outskirts of Lagos—within an episodic narrative that defies the chrono-normativity of the development paradigm.