Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
I have my PhD in literary theory, more specifically post-colonial studies. Yet, I cannot say with confidence that I fundamentally know what Derrida’s On Grammatology is about. To me, Judith Butler’s abjection remains as amorphous as it was six year ago when I first encountered her concept. And quite frankly, I doubt that three or four scholars can agree on the essentials of Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” If my fellow travelers and I cannot say even within the uncertainty principle what the main thinkers in our field are talking about; if their specialized language is too specialized for scholars in their field, there is something very wrong. Imagine physicians in the operating room whose language is so densely individualistic that they cannot understand each other – the result is a comedy of deadly errors! Even though we often teach writers who by definition are engaged with the world, we not only hide their works in impenetrable theories but also disengage their aesthetics from the material world from which they produced their contribution to culture. For example, William Wordsworth wrote the poem “To Touissant L’Overture” for the Haitian revolutionary; addressed the French revolution in the Prelude; and called for the “language of men” as an alternative to the straight jacketed standardized English encoded in Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary. But in our classrooms, he is a poet who eschewed the hyper-rationalism of the enlightenment for the more emotive world of aesthetics and noble peasants. I would think that the historical Wordsworth concerned with the fate of the Haitian leader, the fate of language and the excesses of the French revolution is more universal, and speaks more to the student today than the Wordsworth who only writes poems recollected in “emotion in tranquility.” And in the hands of postcolonial scholars Wordsworth is altogether unintelligible. There are two issues here – one is how we teach writers who are engaged with world - and the other one is how to make literary theory engage with the world in which we lived. In a way I am fortunate to inhabit the world of both the writer and the literary scholar. I certainly would not like to see my poetry or fiction hidden in obscure theory when my whole struggle as a writer is to reach as many people as possible. At the same time I understand the tremendous importance of literary theory and criticism. Literary traditions grow from the laboring and sometimes bickering writers and critics. And literary theory and criticism do have fundamentally important things to say about our world and how we live in it. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |