Affectability, temporality, and postcolonial subjectification in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Bibliographic Data

ID13048705
AuthorsFarah Bakaari (0000-0002-0738-185X, Cornell University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume17
Issue2
Pages266-280
Publication date2023-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the African Literature Association (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2167-4736 • E-ISSN: 2167-4744
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/21674736.2023.2211857
OpenAlexW4378980690
LanguageEN
References cited12

This article engages with Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to examine what happens when the promise of future-making, conceptually restored with independence, confronts an unchanged, unchangeable present? I argue that Armah’s novel positions affect and affectability as the primary mode of subjectification and subjugation in the postcolony. More specifically, I show how the novel advances a postcolonial theory of affect that scrutinizes the progressivist temporal politics that founds the postcolonial state and the affective economies that sustain it. In turn, I argue that disaffection becomes the primary way the novel resists the progressivist ethos of the postcolony as it enables Armah’s protagonist to reckon with the tragedy of freedoms unrealized and recognize himself as a subject in and of history

Art · Epistemology · Independence (probability theory · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Subjectification · Temporality · Tragedy (event · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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