Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality
Carole Boyce Davies In “Beyond Unicentricity. Transcultural Black Presences” [xii] I had critiqued the logic of simply moving centers which I saw in one period of Ngugi’s work and suggested the need for another model that did not rely on any one “centricity”. Globalectics offers precisely this refinement of Ngugi’s decolonial discourse and therefore predictably has the potential to open another theoretical option for scholars who have struggled with the limitations of received frameworks from Hegel and Marx to Derrida. Thus just as Marx built on Hegelian dialectics, subsequent scholars and artists can advance the intent of globalectics seeing it as a scholarly basis for future theorizations. The importance of theorizing from other than Western standpoints is also another valuable contribution provided here. Carolyn Cooper defines “low theory” as the way subjects outside of academia theorize in language that is used by the working-class masses, disrupting the hegemony that privileges knowledge production from the Eurocentric academy” (Proud Flesh interview).[xiv] With a similar intent, Ngugi wa Thiong’o provides a definition of “poor theory” as reminding us that “the density of words is not the same thing as the complexity of thought; that such density, sometimes, can obscure clarity of thought.”(3) A significant argument for sure, for the tendency in the academy leading up to the turn of the century tended towards at times a confused density with at times European derived linguistic flourishes without substance. Ngugi has been one of those writers who has advanced theoretical positions in the study of African and other world literatures, in the creative and theoretical arenas and sometimes jointly in the “creative/theoretical”[xv]. As indicated, his discussion of language articulated in his Decolonizing the Mind advanced decolonizing theory as it pertains to language and literature. Globalectics takes this discussion further, offering a way of moving beyond popular discourses of “post-ness”. His articulation of a “multi-logue” combining the global with the dialectical, offers a way of engaging a variety of cultural and theoretical positions (8). Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [xiii] Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Intellectual Presences" Research in African Literatures 30:2 (Summer, 1998): 96-109. [xiv] New Journal of Afrikan Culture, Politics and Consciousness www.proudflesh.com 4(2004). [xv] Carole Boyce Davies, “The Caribbean Creative/Theoretical” in The Caribbean Woman Writer as Scholar. Creating, Imagining Theorizing. Ed. Keshia N. Abraham. Coconut Creek, Florida: Caribbean Studies Press, 2009), xi-xiii. |
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 |