The aesthetics and politics of political violence in West African literature
In my dissertation, I argue that political violence and emancipation are closely connected domains of meaning in African literature. By exploring a heterogeneous conceptualization of political violence which incorporates its physical and symbolic forms as well as its negative and transformative elements, I examine the West African literary responses to colonialism, post-independence oppression, and civil war, focusing upon the way political violence as a central formal, thematic and symbolic trope disrupts its conventional reception as a nihilist force. In addition to analyzing the traumatic and shattering effects of violence on persons, spaces, and nations, I discuss how narrating experiences of organized and excessive violence deploys disruptive aesthetics and politics of representation that disable the possibility of stable and normative readings and highlight its detachment from the actual. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from African literary philosophy, postcolonial criticism, and Critical Theory, I discuss how West African writers reposition the excess of political violence to liberate their narratives from instrumental readings and suggest a discursive space for utopian thinking. Chapter One draws upon theories of aesthetics and politics of representation and human liberation to explore the heterogeneity of narrative depictions of political violence in West African fiction. My discussion of the aesthetics and politics of narrative representations of political violence in my literary corpus engages with three aesthetic modes along three literary generations that have shaped the aesthetics and politics of representations in West African literature. Chapter Two discusses how Négritude and revolutionary consciousness shape narrative representation of colonial violence in Camara Laye’s The African Child and Ousamen Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood and deploy a decolonial imaginary of revolutionary subjects to reflect on symbolic and empirical accounts of human liberation. In Chapter Three, I examine how fragmented accounts of post-independence violence in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born register the pervasive experience of social and political disillusionment and grotesque aesthetics to articulate a detached potential of a new African consciousness of the self and the community. Chapter Four examines how excessive violence and the child-soldier figure shape the hyperrealist representation of West African civil wars in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone and mobilize a reading for the messianic. Chapter Five discusses the process of rewriting the Nigeria-Biafra war in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and how it empowers a womanist rhetoric of emancipation.
Political violence West African novel Aesthetics and politics of representation Critical Theory Emancipation Negative utopianism