A weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalist Bildung

Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah'sThe Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Bibliographic Data

ID2178569
AuthorsHugh Charles O’connell
Year2012
Volume48
Issue4
Pages371-383
Publication date2012-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2011.574855
OpenAlexW1991368021
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited9

Most criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah's 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has concentrated on the pessimistic aspects of the text, highlighting the failures of postcolonial nationalist movements, and ranking Armah's work "among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during the first decade of independence in Africa" (Lazarus, "(Re)turn to the People" in The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, ed. Charles Cantalupo [Trenton, NJ: African World, 1995]). This article contests such readings and works towards the recovery of a latent, weak utopianism that works similarly to Derrida's conception of messianicity without messianism and the promise for the event yet to-come. Instead of viewing the novel as an historical account of the failures of postcolonial nationalism, this weak-utopian reading privileges the promise and possibility that arise from the text itself. Thus the article underscores the need for a negative dialectical or weak-utopian politics, recognizing, in Adorno's words, the "consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately [ ... ], the creation of a reconciled non-identity" (55

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Identity (music · Literature · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious Studies

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