Post-dialectic: politics in postcolonial African fiction

Abstract

The paper describes and analyses the political agenda of current African writers. These writers attempt to fill the lacuna of uncertainty about the political in the postcolonial era, when the clear enemy provided by colonialism and neo-colonialism is not always quite so apparent. Their attempt to find political agency is via a rigorous critique of the Marxist dialectic utilised by African nationalism, a critique which, at the least, extends that dialectic into a constellation of multiple dialectics and consequently defamiliarises previous notions of the political. The politics of this fiction might be described as dissident, and its aesthetics is nothing if not inclusive.