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5. New Nations, New Novels

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Worlds Within
This chapter is in the book Worlds Within
5new nations, new novelsUntimely tellingsin the postcolony, writes Mbembe in a political anatomy partial-ly inspired by Fanon and derrida, “time is not a series but an interlock-ing of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other pres-ents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones.” “discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings” regularly interpenetrate and enclose one another, and time takes on the structure of entanglement, “a bundle of unforeseen events, of more or less regular fluctuations and oscillations, not necessarily resulting in chaos and anar-c hy.”1 For Mbembe, in one of several points that link him to Fanon, the postcolony is not simply after the colony but repeats it. the postcolony’s regime of arbitrary violence, depersonalization, and excessive subjectifica-tion installed according to the laws of a “burden of fiction” assigned indis-criminately to places, events, and persons reproduces an Africa of saturat-ed sensation, raw physicality, and rampant terror (180). For all that these postcolonial portraits return an African same (chaos and anarchy) to a co-lonial sender, they also contain the possibility of difference. if power in the postcolony is characterized by a “distinctive style of political improvi-sation” (102) and a “chaotically pluralistic” system of signs (108), Mbembe shows the genres of political life in the postcolony to follow suit. Volatile and multivalent, they are animated by life beyond their own, be it the phallic body of neocolonial power that the political joke, cartoon, fable,
© 2020 Stanford University Press, Redwood City

5new nations, new novelsUntimely tellingsin the postcolony, writes Mbembe in a political anatomy partial-ly inspired by Fanon and derrida, “time is not a series but an interlock-ing of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other pres-ents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones.” “discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings” regularly interpenetrate and enclose one another, and time takes on the structure of entanglement, “a bundle of unforeseen events, of more or less regular fluctuations and oscillations, not necessarily resulting in chaos and anar-c hy.”1 For Mbembe, in one of several points that link him to Fanon, the postcolony is not simply after the colony but repeats it. the postcolony’s regime of arbitrary violence, depersonalization, and excessive subjectifica-tion installed according to the laws of a “burden of fiction” assigned indis-criminately to places, events, and persons reproduces an Africa of saturat-ed sensation, raw physicality, and rampant terror (180). For all that these postcolonial portraits return an African same (chaos and anarchy) to a co-lonial sender, they also contain the possibility of difference. if power in the postcolony is characterized by a “distinctive style of political improvi-sation” (102) and a “chaotically pluralistic” system of signs (108), Mbembe shows the genres of political life in the postcolony to follow suit. Volatile and multivalent, they are animated by life beyond their own, be it the phallic body of neocolonial power that the political joke, cartoon, fable,
© 2020 Stanford University Press, Redwood City

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Acknowledgments xi
  4. Preface xv
  5. 1. Introduction: Inner Territories 1
  6. 2. National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel 55
  7. 3. The Soul of Nationhood: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place 98
  8. 4. Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon 140
  9. 5. New Nations, New Novels 181
  10. 6. My Nation, My Object: Severo Sarduy’s Fantasmatic Cuba 217
  11. Postscript: Remapping the Nation 261
  12. Notes 277
  13. Index 345
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804772501-007

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Acknowledgments xi
  4. Preface xv
  5. 1. Introduction: Inner Territories 1
  6. 2. National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel 55
  7. 3. The Soul of Nationhood: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place 98
  8. 4. Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon 140
  9. 5. New Nations, New Novels 181
  10. 6. My Nation, My Object: Severo Sarduy’s Fantasmatic Cuba 217
  11. Postscript: Remapping the Nation 261
  12. Notes 277
  13. Index 345
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