Recent articles have called for postcolonial and ecology-minded criticism to engage with each other, suggesting, too, some of the points of difficulty they might encounter when they do. One point of difficulty lies in how these two forms of criticism develop differing evaluations of discourse and its relation to what counts as real. This essay proposes resolving this difficulty with a materialist apprehension of discourse and suggests that a postcolonial ecocriticism enacted this way might have value generally for African studies. The essay then examines J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, a novel that has been explored as exemplar of postcolonial ecological thinking, and argues that while Michael K may indeed be shaped by attitudes typical of postcolonial thinking at its inception, it is not a novel with much interest in ecology. The issue for an African ecocriticism, then, is how to grasp the novel's writing of nature. I argue that its historical juncture provides an interpretive context for how the novel subordinates its writing of nature to its postcolonial suspicion of the modern nation state.

Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology and Life & Times of Michael K

In this essay, I argue for “fugitive gardening” as a form of “poaching” or “resignifying,” a radical appropriation of hegemonic spaces and practices that both deconstructs the logics of mastery and...

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Notes from underground: fugitive ecology and the ethics of place

The South African novelist and Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is widely studied around the world and attracts considerable critical attention. With the publication of Disgrace Coetzee began to enjoy popular as well as critical acclaim, but his work can be as challenging as it is impressive. This book is addressed to students and readers of Coetzee: it is an up-to-date survey of the writer's fiction and context, written accessibly for those new to his work. All of the fiction is discussed, and the brooding presence of the political situation in South Africa, during the first part of his career, is given serious attention in a comprehensive account of the author's main influences. The revealing strand of confessional writing in the latter half of Coetzee's career is given full consideration. This Introduction will help new readers understand and appreciate one of the most important and challenging authors in contemporary literature.

The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee

Modernism, Idiocy, and the Work of Culture: J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K

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Nuruddin Farah: Selected bibliography

they may not be part of that activity. Thus, the key to the treasure of myth and writing consists, as the John Barth of Bellerophoniad and personal interviews suggests, in recognizing that the literary convention of realism is as far as myth can get from itself. It is, Barth says, \"better to address the archetypes directly\" and to trust, albeit in a rather ad hoc and unconcerned fashion, to 'comedy' and self-explanatory context\" (199). In this way it becomes truly possible to create \"a kind of myths called novels\" (248).

Black Earth, White Myth: Coetzee's Michael K

Nuruddin Farah's A Naked Needle (1976), and Ayi Kwei Armah's Why Are We So Blest? (1972), are both novels set in failing revolutions in postcolonial states, one a decade after independence and the other immediately in its wake. They are also novels that in their treatment of racially mixed marriages and relationships make considerable play, either of a serious or satiric kind, with race-sex archetypes inherited from colonialism. This article will attempt to determine the value die authors attach to the latter paradigms and what connection they have, if any, with the process of revolutionary decline. Koschin, die mercurial narrator of Farah's novel, is at once raconteur and reporter, romantic revolutionary and astute political commentator, idealist and realist. At the visit to Mogadiscio of his English fiancA©e Nancy, diree years after General Syad Barre's Soviet-backed military coup of 1969, Koschin is still determinedly celebrating the "revolutionary" event that ended the chaos of colonial parliamentary models: "Before this blessed Revolution, Nancy, there were over sixty political parties in this Country of Curiosity. . . . Each major tribe had a party to its name, each major party had a major tribe to support her" (99). ' His euphoria, however,

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v035/35.1.wright.pdf

Requiems for Revolutions: Race-Sex Archetypes in Two African Novels

Twenty years ago the English critic Tony Tanner maintained, as the central thesis of his book City of Words (1971), that the fictional imagination of postwar America was as much troubled by the postmodernist novel's dissolution of form as by the constrictive, overdefinitive forms of conventional realism. Tanner linked the erosion of formal distinctions with fears of an entropie universe in which energy was always running down: the abiding anxiety of 1960s writers who discussed entropy (Pynchon, Burroughs) was its homogenizing effect on the universe where all things dwindled to nothing, all things became alike. The waste-making process resulted in a confusion and merging of identities and an eventual dissolving of all things into a blank, formless waste, a perfect homogeneity of nothingness. John Updike was never of this experimental school of writers but, as Tanner observed, the characters of his early novels discussed these same processes, and the landscapes they inhabited were afflicted by the same cosmic entropy or universal wasting. Conner, in The Poorhouse Fair (1959), theorizes about \"entropÃ-a,\" and George Caldwell, in The Centaur (1963), sees Nature as \"garbage and confusion.\" Harry Angstrom, a tidy man who dislikes waste in his domestic affairs if not in his sexual ones, moves

Mapless Motion: Form and Space in Updike's Rabbit, Run

Angela Smith's selective study of significant anglophone East African writers is a lucid and knowledgeable introductory work which will be of value to the newcomer. After a brief look at the sensationalist popular fiction of Charles Mangua and Mwangi Ruheni, Smith turns to Meja Mwangi's 1974 novel of Kenya's \"Emergency\" period, Carcase for Hounds, and commends it for its subtly inconclusive, self-undermining quest motifs, its low-key rhetoric and its unheroic view of the Mau Mau insurgency (the title, taken from Julius Caesar, has connotations of a divisive civil war rather than a unifying anticolonial one). Smith then focuses on the more substantial achievements of the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah and argues that both are formal experimenters who explode conventions: each calls for a \"participating reader\" who is stimulated to perceive the questions in the subject matter and to make the required connections between narrative strategy and theme, text and title. In her close readings of individual texts, she is instructive on the complex patterns of guilt and betrayal in Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat and the collusion of family and state authoritarianisms in Farah's Dictatorship trilogy. She is, however, alert to the slippery, painstaking fair-mindedness of Farah's vision, in which the monstrous matriarch Idil is balanced by the gentle patriarch Deeriye, who demonstrates that Islam can be a source of political opposition as well as oppression. In the discussion of Maps, Farah's tortuous representation of national and ethnic identity is briefly examined, but this intricate and intriguing novel needs more attention to do it full justice, and it is a pity that no consideration is given to the ornate oral tradition of Somali poetry which informs the dense, baroque texture of Farah's prose. The long chapter on Ngugi which forms the pivot of the book is wideranging and balanced, taking account of the fiction's glaring stylistic limitations (notably, the simplistic quasi-peasant style of Weep Not, Child) as well as its emotional power, narrative complexity and problematic polemics (in each novel an apparent resolution opens out into a new set of questions). Ngugi's complex use of oral culture in A Grain of Wheat is seen to indicate both the determining, circumscriptive role of the past in the present and the dissolution that takes place between them. The narrative perspective is shifting, relativist and fragmentary, and in the next novel, Petals of Blood, it is even more so. In this essentially nonrealistic novel of broken psyches (in which Kenya, not Karenga, is the central character), the information comes in fragments, often the wrong

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v038/38.4.wright.pdf

Derek Wright

Papers

Black Earth, White Myth: Coetzee's Michael K

Requiems for Revolutions: Race-Sex Archetypes in Two African Novels

Mapless Motion: Form and Space in Updike's Rabbit, Run

East African Writing in English (review)