In this introduction to the special issue, “Animating Theories of the Material: Approaching Animist Being in Postcolonial Literatures,” Rosemary Jolly and Alexander Fyfe consider the recent surge of interest in animisms within postcolonial studies alongside the roughly coeval turn to questions of materiality within the humanities. Introducing the five essays in the issue, they raise questions around the potential limitations of various forms of materialism, both “new” and “old,” and highlight possible ways in which postcolonial scholars might responsibly attend to animist modes of thought. They argue for the political importance and the ethical necessity of an approach to animisms that does not reduce them to a “theory” of the material, yet at the same time bears witness to the full range of materialities that obtain within such worldviews.
This introduction to the special issue, 'Marxism and African Literatures: New Interventions,' argues for the continued relevance of Marxist approaches within African literary studies. After a discussion of the place of Marxism in the field today, a brief history of important Marxist interventions is provided, with particular attention paid to works by Omafume F. Onoge, Biodun Jeyifo, George M. Gugelberger, and Chidi Amuta. Against this background, the nine essays (and one afterword) contained in this issue are introduced.
This article proposes the concept of noncapitalist wealth as a line of inquiry into the relations among capitalism, animism, and literary production. I begin by discussing the methodological implications of Harry Garuba’s influential essay on “animist materialism” and suggest that Garuba’s operating theory of capital means that his method ultimately leads to a mode of reading that understands animism as bearing primarily upon representation rather than on literary production. The result is a mode of reading that lacks sensitivity to the implications of the influence of specific animisms on individual texts. Eschewing an encompassing theory of animism’s relation to literary production, I propose the concept of noncapitalist wealth, derived in part from Karl Marx and anthropologists such as Jane I. Guyer, as a potential avenue of inquiry within the debate around literary animisms. I offer a reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy (1990–1998) to demonstrate the ways in which an operating concept of wealth, combined with a sensitivity to contemporary forms of capitalism, can help to reveal the political dimension of some literary texts.
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