Postcolonial Satire: Ivan Vladislavic

Abstract

This paper examines politics in postcolonialism in the form of satire, specifically focusing on the work of Ivan Vladislavic. Despite the ludic lightness of satire, it has been a useful literary tool for exposing and destabilising political regimes of various sorts. Vladislavic uses motifs throughout his fiction to create unity and coherence in his short story cycles, and many of these motifs centre around a satirical understanding of power as a monumentalising impulse. Vladislavic lampoons the monumental, and as with Foucault’s analyses of the architectonics of power, this operates discursively as well as materially. Monumentalism pervades not only the material, as in a central character/narrator, architecture, design, space, place, sculpture; but also certain attitudes, tones and especially words. However, Vladislavic’s fiction is not confined to a systematic analysis of systematicity, for it is characterised by play; his antidote to monumental power is a dry witty irony, a playful insurrectionary iconoclasm, combined with a focus on the quirky and idiosyncratic. This paper finds that Vladislavi‰ creates an answer to the question of postcolonial political commitment; the postcolonial cannot ignore the overtly political, but neither can it sacrifice the specific, apparently irrelevant, idiosyncratic or humourous to a cause. Vladislavi‰’s ludic lightness helps to create spaces in which freedom can be imagined, especially when such lightness is applied to the mechanical and monolithic.