Race, Class and Performativity

Abstract

The tensions surrounding re(-)presentation in African literature lead to a series of questions about the status of the individual subject. Can an autonomous African subject emerge in a global context in which the structures and categories of colonial rule persist under a perpetual state of unfinished decolonization? Must the African subject remain forever in thrall to the exclusionary practices of metropolitan subjectification? Is the individual in African literature ever simply an individual, or is the single subject forever doomed to an overde-termined socio-political representational function? In the struggle to recuperate a space for the individual in African writing, race has played a central part. The African self, that is to say, only materializes in the transnational space of reading through the exclusionary practices of racialized becoming and, by extension, its status as ‘other’. The tension which arises from these formations of self is highlighted in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, Nuruddin Farah’s Links and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not. In each novel, the status of the individual subject is foregrounded in distinct narrative forms which highlight, in different contexts, the centrality of race and racialized formations in the development of the African self. Addressing the dissociation of migrancy, the difficulty of return and the struggle simply to be within a racially-stratified society, each of these novels highlights the peculiar anxiety which has marked the construction of the individual subject in African literature.