Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, 104 pages, $24.00, £16.50, ISBN 9780231159500.
Over the past five decades, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has produced an important body of literature concerned with the history, theory, and experiences of the struggles for political freedom in colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial circumstances. His best-known novels—Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967)—reflect, and reflect upon, the Mau Mau guerrilla war for Kenyan independence and the struggles and disappointments of post-independence and neo-colonial Kenya. His best-known work of criticism, Decolonising the Mind (1986), remains a forceful critique of linguistic imperialism as a pillar of neo-colonialism. There he argues that since a people’s self-understanding is bound up with the use of language, the adoption of a colonial language—such as English, French, or Portuguese—as a prestige language of communication dispossesses the colonized of their culture, sense of place, and historical memory. Hence the need for the subaltern peoples to “decolonize the mind” by building and reinforcing the literary and oral traditions and practices that reflect upon their own languages, cultures, and histories.
In Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Ngũgĩ revisits these themes to consider new prospects for the creation and expansion of a literary space freed from the “straightjackets of nationalism.” He calls forth and performs a literary space of “globalectics” where, like a globe, on the surface every point is equally a center, though each is also equidistant from the internal center (page 8). He argues for a concept of world literature that emphasizes the necessity of “mutually affecting” cultural exchange that transcends national or regional boundaries. At the same time, Ngũgĩ casts a retrospective look at his own political and literary commitments. In a sense, Globalectics bears strong thematic resemblances to his other most recent publications: the memoirs Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter (2012). Globalectics and In the House of the Interpreter discuss, from similar angles, his youthful shock at the destruction of his village upon returning from his first term at Alliance High School in 1955, the subversive powers he found in Shakespeare, and his distaste—acquired from his literature teacher James Stephen Smith—for jargon. (In Globalectics, he states that an over-reliance on academic jargon transforms theory into a modern scholasticism.) Just as his memoirs have allowed him to revisit his “intellectual awakening” during the Mau Mau guerrilla war (the narrative of the second volume ends in 1959), in Globalectics, Ngũgĩ stages a kind of theoretical memoir that traces the influence of African and Caribbean literature, Negritude, and Frantz Fanon on his work between the time of the composition of his first two novels and his debates at the University of Nairobi spurred by the co-authored document (composed by Ngũgĩ, Owuor Anyumba, and Taban lo Liyong) “On the Abolition of the English Department” (1968). By engaging with these African and Caribbean literatures, he came to question the Eurocentric assumptions of the Western literary canon.
Ngũgĩ presents “On the Abolition of the English Department” as a turning point in his intellectual development. It contains the primary theoretical concerns that have animated much of his subsequent work. To decolonize the mind, literatures, and literary spaces, requires three tasks: first, to create conceptual tools for critical readings of English and other European literatures from anti-colonial, or now, post-colonial, standpoints; second, to challenge the status of English as the prestige language of literature; and third, to subvert the received boundaries that are assumed to be constitutive of literature, such as the distinction between literature and orature (a term that he prefers to “oral literature”).
In the first two chapters, Ngũgĩ casts the emergence of critical anti-colonial consciousness in the terms of the Hegelian dialectic of lord and bondsman, or, more accurately, Fanon’s reinscription of this dialectic as a figure of anti-colonial struggles (he references Black Skin, White Masks but engages more directly with The Wretched of the Earth, where he draws on the chapter “On National Culture”). While for Hegel, this moment of the dialectic occurs between two independent consciousnesses, for Fanon the struggle between lord and bondsman begins after the colonizer has already subjugated the colonized, destroying not only the social relations of the colonized but also their culture and historical memory (of course, Fanon did not want to return to these traditions, rather cultural and historical memory were to be dialectically reconstituted through revolutionary struggle). Thus Fanon brings out “the real, historical violence at the heart of Bildung, a formative education of the spirit, of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” (page 24). The operative word in this passage is Bildung, for in the first two chapters Ngũgĩ narrates a history of anti-colonial political consciousness that is by turns historical, epistemological, and personal.
Ngũgĩ focuses on the transformative power of literary space, how literary space is imbricated in the politics and practices of knowing. He argues that critical literary practices, in both a historical sense and an autobiographical sense, begin with fiction and lead to theory as writers grapple not only with their political situations, but also attempt to understand the canons—especially the colonial canons imposed on the colonized—of knowledge and literature. We should understand his claim that “Fiction is the original poor theory” (page 15) in both its historical and personal force: “poor theory,” as he defines it, is a standpoint that accords “dignity to the poor as they fight poverty, including…poverty of theory” (page 2). He recounts the historical development of critical anti-colonial practice leading from Caribbean and African authors and novelists such as C.L.R. James, George Lamming, and Peter Abrahams, through the Pan-Africanism of Negritude, to the revolutionary theory and practice of Fanon. In Ngũgĩ’s intellectual formation, as he recounts it, it is with fiction that he is first able to reflect upon his own lived experience as a colonial subject and understand the “inner logic of social processes such as colonialism and neo-colonialism” (page 19). Nevertheless, he argues, while fiction can provide a viewpoint on social processes and movements, as theory it cannot be reflexive in its relation to other works—“it could not read other fiction” (page 19).
This claim—that fiction cannot read other fiction—is arguable, but I take it to be a statement about Ngũgĩ’s own intellectual formation. He finds that fiction cannot self-reflexively theorize the colonial production of knowledge in the sciences, history, theory, and literature. Or, to rephrase the problem, fiction cannot conceptualize those practices of intellectual emancipation that could liberate the colonized from a colonial literary and cultural space. Ngũgĩ’s retrospective look at his intellectual development closes (near the end of Chapter Two) with reflections about “On the Abolition of the English Department,” which set the agenda for his subsequent literary criticism, but also details what he considers to be crucial problems in thinking the prospects for, and impediments to, a “globalectical imagination” (as he calls it in Chapter Three), which makes it possible to think the space (or spaces) of world literature.
In Chapter Three, Ngũgĩ argues that world literature is “here,” made possible not only because of greater technologies of communication and cultural exchange, but also due to the influence of post-colonial theory in practices of reading and interpreting critically the Western canon. This influence extends beyond academia, as mainstream Western literary periodicals display something of a democratic conception of literary exchange that, in however truncated a fashion, recognizes the global character of contemporary literature. But Ngũgĩ notes that while “World literature is here: unfortunately, it has not meant the end of national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness” (page 48). There remain two impediments to a truly world literature and a globalectical imagination: (a) the hierarchy of languages and cultures through a system of what he calls “linguistic feudalism” or “aesthetic feudalism,” and (b) the maintenance of Eurocentric assumptions about literature, especially the boundary between literature and orature. At stake is what we might call the politics of world literature. As the first two chapters demonstrate, literature can be a powerful force for political empowerment. The imaginative resources of literature transform a particular narrative or particular objects of lived experience “into a kind of universality in which readers of different ages, climes, and gender can see themselves and the world in which they live, differently” (page 16). And world literature offers a greater possibility of cultural exchange and transformation. But, though world literature is here, its resources have yet to be fully explored. Ngũgĩ notes that one impediment is the vastness of world literature, but more problematic impediments are the epistemological prejudices that still shape Western culture.
The primary impediment to a fuller construction of a space of world literature is linguistic, or in a more expansive sense, is aesthetic feudalism (pages 60–61). Aesthetic feudalism rests on a hierarchy of value between languages and cultures. The “aristocratic” languages, as Ngũgĩ puts it, are a select group of European prestige languages such as English, French, German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish, while the languages and literatures of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and indigenous America have a subordinate status that accords them lesser prestige and importance. (Interestingly, he does not address whether the growing economic and political importance of India and China is giving rise to a rearrangement of the hierarchy of prestige languages and cultures, or if it is part of a dynamic of globalectical decentering.) Part of this hierarchical organization itself rests on the European assumption that writing is superior to oral techniques of historical and cultural transmission (this is the subject of Chapter Four). Oral transmission, according to the Eurocentric-colonial view, signals that a given linguistic community is prehistorical, while written methods of transmission signal the entry of a people into history. Ngũgĩ argues that this assumption produces a narrow understanding of what literature is—reducing it to a formal and stylistic exercise shaped according to European aesthetic categories, when literature is a transformative social practice nourished by orature. Orature—and the oral aesthetic—constantly subverts distinctions between the various arts, such as poetry, music, and dance, and received distinctions between prose and poetry. Literature, if we define it as the practice of writing the fictive imagination rather than the production of a high style, itself draws from oral traditions and the other arts, while undermining clear distinctions between high and low cultural production. As Ngũgĩ claims, “there has always been continuous literarization of the oral and oralization of the literary” (page 84). Given the “interlinkage” between orature and literature, the hierarchization of languages and literatures is not justified. Instead, languages and cultures circulate—or ought to circulate—through networks of exchange and mutual enrichment. He writes:
the oral and the written are not and have never been real antagonists. Certainly, the powers of their products, orature and literature, will continually be harnessed to enrich creativity in the age of internet and cyberspace. The problem has not been the fact of the oral or the written, but their placement in a hierarchy. Network, not hierarchy, will free the richness of the aesthetic, oral or literary (page 85).
Thus Ngũgĩ calls for pedagogical changes—such as the creation of departments of world literature—to reflect the new global space of literature.
Nevertheless, aesthetic feudalism, as Ngũgĩ acknowledges when he introduces his discussion of world literature by contrasting Goethe and Marx, is not merely pedagogical or epistemological, but also political. European languages and cultures remain prestigious because they are imbricated in European and American economic hegemony, which both produces and reproduces their status as languages of economic and cultural access. In the neoliberal world, the nations and peoples of the global south are still linked peripherally to the economic and cultural capitals of Europe and the United States (if not also, as I mentioned above, China or India). As Gerardo Mosquera notes in his analysis of the art world:
One of the worst problems of the Southern Hemisphere is its lack of internal integration and horizontal communication, in contrast with its vertical—and subaltern—connection with the North…the barrier is not just South-North due to centre-periphery relations of power, but South-South, as a consequence of a post-colonial deformation (1992: 39–40).
The reader is left with the difficult yet urgent question: what politics can match the intellectual emancipation of world literature to political liberation? What politics could emerge with the imaginative powers of world literature? In Globalectics, Ngũgĩ underlines how much has changed due to anti-colonial and post-colonial literary practices, while mapping out how much has yet to be done.
References
Mosquera G 1992 The Marco Polo syndrome: some problems around art and eurocentrism. Third Text 6(21) 35–41.
