Table Of ContentNEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE
Dictators, Dictatorship
and the African Novel
Fictions of the State under Neoliberalism
Robert Spencer
New Comparisons in World Literature
Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Department of English
Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK
Sharae Deckard, School of English, Drama & Film Studies,
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one
ofthemostexcitingcurrentdebatesinhumanitiesbyapproaching‘world
literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular
kind of writing.We take ‘worldliterature’to bethat body of writingthat
registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the histor-
ical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that
take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the
global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar
new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result.
Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this
decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.
Editorial Board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA
Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland
Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK
Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK
Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA
Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India
Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK.
More information about this series at
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Robert Spencer
Dictators, Dictatorship
and the African Novel
Fictions of the State under Neoliberalism
Robert Spencer
English and American Studies
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
ISSN 2634-6095 ISSN 2634-6109 (electronic)
New Comparisons in World Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-66555-5 ISBN 978-3-030-66556-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2
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Acknowledgments
This book has been unconscionably long in the making. Stuff gets in the
wayofcourse.Andthesehavebeentumultuousyearspolitically;it’smore
useful to live these experiences than to write about them, as someone
oncesaid.Researchalsohasatendencytosendyouoffconstantlyinnew
directions,especiallywhenonehastakenonthequixotictaskofstudying
novels about dictatorship (of which there are of course hundreds, in all
languagesandinallpartsoftheworld)andofexplaininghowthosenovels
explore the world-historical processes of decolonisation and recolonisa-
tion. The good news is that I learned a huge amount, though much of
that learning went into several other projects that were conceived after I
startedthisoneandcompletedbeforeIfinishedit.Consequentlythebad
news, for me at least, was that this project sat on the back-burner for a
fewyearsuntilIrealisedwhatIactuallywantedtodowithit—writeabout
African fictions of the state under neoliberalism. This study is the result.
I’m most in debt to the undergraduate and postgraduate students at
The University of Manchester with whom I have discussed these works
in class and also to the organisers and participants of conferences and
research seminars at Leicester, Pittsburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester
and Kent where I’ve presented my ideas.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: The Unfinished Project of Decolonisation 1
References 33
2 Neoliberalism and the ‘Recolonisation’ of Africa 37
The Origins of Dictatorship 40
‘Virtual Democracy’ 51
Africa’s Unfinished Revolution 57
‘1968’, le debut d’une lutte prolongée 67
Bibliography 82
3 Performance and Power I: Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o’s
Wizard of the Crow 89
Art at War with the State 93
Performing the State in the Era of Structural Adjustment 102
Wizard of the Crow and a Democracy of Readers 119
Bibliography 136
4 Performance and Power II: Ahmadou Kourouma’s
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote 141
Rupture or Continuity? 145
A Poem in Praise of the Dictator 149
The Fetishism of Power 157
Dictatorship ‘Goes On and On’ 165
‘A Praxis That Has Yet to Begin’ 173
References 180
vii
viii CONTENTS
5 Allegories of Dictatorship in Nigerian Fiction: Chinua
Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus 183
Allegory as a Method of Reading 184
Nigeria, Under-Development and the State 191
Preparation for Praxis: Anthills of the Savannah 196
Training for Democratic Citizenship: Purple Hibiscus 215
Totality and Transformation 233
Bibliography 244
6 Conclusion: The Counter-Counter-Revolution 249
References 270
Index 273
About the author
Robert Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and
Cultures at the University of Manchester. He is the author of
Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave, 2011) and
the co-author (with David Alderson) of For Humanism: Explorations
in Theory and Politics (Pluto Press, 2017) and (with Anastasia Valas-
sopoulos) of Postcolonial Locations: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies
(Routledge, 2020).
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Unfinished Project
of Decolonisation
The subject of this book is, in the words of Birahima, the child-soldier-
narrator of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah Is Not Obliged (2000), ‘Africa
withitsbarbaricdictatorshipsandliberticidalfathersofnations’.1Itsfocus
is on African fiction written in the period since the 1970s. This is the
period that saw the whole of Africa finally emerge from colonial rule, a
truly world-historical development, albeit one marred by both durable
and original, direct as well as indirect, forms of imperialist domination
in that continent. This is the age, paradoxically, of decolonisation and of
what John Saul has referred to as Africa’s recolonisation.2 World history
since the 1970s, the age of what would come to be known as neoliber-
alism,isthestoryofrulingelites’effortstocombatacrisisofprofitability
on a global scale. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey’s indispensable ‘brief
history’ofitshows,hasbeenanefforttofreecapitalfromtheconstraints
imposed or merely threatened by the political-economic organisation of
subordinate social groups: from, for example, ‘burdensome’ taxation,
from employment regulations, from political ‘interference’ in the right
of capital to get a quick and easy return on investments, from envi-
ronmental legislation and, most significantly of all (though this is not a
point that Harvey looks at in much detail), from the desire of peoples of
previously colonised territories to own and control their own resources.3
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel,
New Comparisons in World Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_1
