Abstract
This chapter explores Chris Abani’s treatment of politics in his major works of fiction: GraceLand (2004), Becoming Abigail (2006), Song for Night (2007), The Virgin of Flames (2007) and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014). Throughout these works, Abani suggests that human beings can no longer serve as either the predicate, or the horizon, of politics. Politics can no longer proceed according to what we already know, and must instead determine how the pursuit of social justice and economic equality might be grounded in an “abyss” defined by ambiguity and violence. The dialectic still has a role to play, but only as a collection of terms and concepts that we “juggle,” not as the clear trajectory of political and economic history.
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Notes
- 1.
As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy , “All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects. That is your world. That you call a world” (1999, 51).
- 2.
Abani has published two other novels, Masters of the Board (1985) and Sirocco (1987), which really belong to a different time and place from his other works. (He wrote Masters of the Board, a political allegory of Nigerian politics , in the early 1980s when he was just 16 years old.) He has also published several volumes of poetry, which are beyond the purview of this chapter.
- 3.
I suspect that Abani, by all accounts a committed humanist (you can see his TED talk, “On Humanity,” here: https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity), would disagree with my reading. Or it might be more apt to say that Abani just tends to discuss his work in terms of humanist ethics, not politics , and my work here tries to think past the ethical and humanist into the political.
- 4.
Abani’s supporters bribed officials to release him from prison and he immediately fled to England, where he lived throughout the 1990s. He moved to the USA in 1999.
- 5.
Of course, it is easy to see why one might conflate history and time . Even Jameson himself does so when he describes postmodernism’s spatial turn away from modernism’s interest in temporal experience as a symptom of our flattened, late-capitalist present; or when he suggests that the “end of temporality ” and the “ontologization of the present” have stemmed directly from the end of history . Timothy Bewes (2007) has been particularly critical of this aspect of Jameson’s work, arguing that Jameson’s own inability to think history temporally undermines his persistent critique of the contemporary ’s conspicuous lack of historical thinking. In Valences… (2009) Jameson seems to acknowledge his mistake, noting not only that “postmodern synchronicity” is not actually atemporal, but also that “contemporary postmodern life” offers “a new kind of time ” (494–495).
- 6.
I include Mason & Dixon in this list to signal my disagreement with Jameson’s contention that making time visible was a primarily modernist project.
- 7.
However, see my Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time (2009) for an examination of the many ways that postmodern authors tried to produce a more phenomenological politics through formal experimentation and innovation.
- 8.
Saidiya Hartman ’s “The Time of Slavery” (2002) exemplifies, but also problematizes, this approach to cultural history .
- 9.
One might also challenge Michaels’ argument by raising the question of structural racism, an idea that would seem to explain how stuff that did not happen to you can still affect you. Michaels prefers to talk about racism as an individualism, in part because he views it, along with anti-racism, as a symptom of neoliberalism ’s individualizing demands on the contemporary subject.
- 10.
I am using “history ” and “historical” here not as an index of past-ness but as a marker of broader significance, to indicate that these experiences are a function of global dynamics and trends.
- 11.
It’s a telling coincidence that Wile E. Coyote also appears in Tom McCarthy ’s “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity,” a publication of McCarthy’s International Necronautical Society, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek agit-prop organization that encourages the sailing toward death as a way to undermine individuality. For McCarthy, Wile E. Coyote properly replaces Oedipus’s tragic relation to death with the insouciant ability to “die almost without noticing, again and again, repeatedly”.
- 12.
Earlier I discussed Jameson’s call for a spatial rather than a temporal dialectic. Even though here he juxtaposes existential and geological time , he is thinking of them spatially, as unified chunks or segments (“levels”) of different times. This is then more evidence of what Timothy Bewes describes as Jameson’s inability to think temporally despite his enduring investment in time and history .
- 13.
Here, and at other key moments in Valences, Jameson’s thinking aligns quite interestingly with the subjectless aims of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. He acknowledges just how difficult it is to “de-narrativize my positionality as a subject and to remove the subjectivity from it,” but he also indicates that doing so is crucial for any attempt to make history appear (552). One indication of just how seriously he takes this subjectless view can be found early in Valences, when he disavows the utility of self-consciousness for the dialectical process. This claim should be juxtaposed to the stirring defense of reflexive self-consciousness that Jameson articulates in his (2008) Critical Inquiry debate with Ian Hunter.
- 14.
I see this as one of the core tensions in Jameson’s work. He always insists on undecidable ambivalence, on the radical negativity of the dialectic, but sometimes he uses undecidable ambivalence to achieve the politics he already knows he wants (something Leftist and Marxist) while at other times he actually allows politics itself to be defined by undecidable ambivalence, or what Lauren Berlant has dubbed “cruel optimism.” When he does the former (e.g. in Chap. 15 of Valences, where he reads various post-Marxisms as symptoms of a cynical reason complicit with capital ), he is being tendentious and deciding the undecidability. At other times, however (e.g. in Chap. 16 of Valences, where he reads Wal-Mart as “Utopian allegory”), he is truly allowing dialectical contradiction to retain its permanent negativity. The danger, of course, is that when he does so, the politics tends to dissipate.
References
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Huehls, M. (2017). Juggling the Dialectic: The Abyss of Politics in Chris Abani’s Fiction. In: Brouillette, S., Nilges, M., Sauri, E. (eds) Literature and the Global Contemporary. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63055-7_9
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