Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
This past December, at the invitation of Joseph Ngunjiri and Mwenda Micheni of the Nation Media group, I conducted a workshop in Nairobi with journalists who cover arts and culture. The goal was simple enough; to see how journalists can apply literary theory to the coverage and criticism of culture and the arts. The workshop had around 15 participants, including bloggers, cartoonists, youth page writers and feature writers. Under the concept of “contradiction,” we used the short story by Chimamanda Adichie, “You in America,” to explore feminism, classism, globalization, transnationalism and world citizenry. I do not expect to see direct application of the Marxian dialectic, but if contradiction will translate into finding the limitations and usefulness of a novel or film and its relationship to the material society, then that should be good enough. My real hope, though, is that the next time a Kenyan politician takes a swipe at the humanities, there will be one or two journalists who will argue against him or her. But we can also get these ideas out there in the form of debate instead of already closed theories. At Cornell University, with Prof. Satya Mohanty and other scholars, we have initiated the Global South Project with the understanding that there is no single center, or that the center is everywhere. Often scholars from the Global South relate to each other through ideological constructs from the West. Thus we triangulate theory, whether political or literary, through the West. Even liberationist concepts and theories such as deconstruction or hybridity end up trapped in the same dialectic from which they are trying to break free. In both, the primary relationships are between the colonized/colonized, the Southern subaltern and the West. Our project has the immediate goal of breaking this linkage in order to generate debates that have no inbuilt hierarchies. We want these discussions to take place as publicly and widely as possible and in as many different centers as possible. Thus variations of this forum on Ngugi Wa Thiong’os Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, will be appearing in World Literature Today, the Journal of Contemporary Thought (India), Wasafiri Journal (London?, South Paw Journal (Australia), Chimurenga (South Africa), Africa Review (Kenya), and political websites such as Pambazuka. Our last forum on national chauvinism in literature had essays in WLT, Pambazuka, Daily Nation (Kenya), Frontline (India) and various blogs and Internet based journals. 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 |