OR HIS RECENT CRITICS, M ŨKOMA WA NG ŨG Ĩ'S TWO DETECTIVE NOVels, Nairobi Heat (2009) and Black Star Nairobi (2013), signal a break with the familiar forms and commitments of postcolonial African writing. The studied application of hardboiled genre conventions to an East African setting, so the argument goes, sets these texts apart from the various social realisms that dominated African literary exports of an earlier era. 1 Just as, for example, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Buekes, Tade Thompson, and others have sparked a twenty-firstcentury "explosion" (O'Connell 687) of African science fiction, so too, perhaps, do Nairobi Heat and Black Star Nairobi mark the arrival of African crime fiction on the world stage. 2 At the same time, as John Marx writes, Mũkoma's novels also "depart from earlier postcolonial fiction, in which the sense of geopolitical possibility remained tethered to the promise and limitations of nation-states" (409). Attuned to the shifting geographies of late capitalist globalization and, specifically, to the expansion of "global cities" like Lagos and Nairobi, which "exceed the administrative purview of any given state," Mũkoma and other Anglophone African writers of his generation have apparently been "freed from an obligation to represent the nation" (Marx 409). His labyrinthine plots unfold, rather, in what Miriam Pahl describes as "postnational" space, a contested territory where the Kenyan state is merely one institutional actor struggling for sovereignty with an array of subnational and supranational rivals,
This article revisits two “Third World classics” published by West Indians in the UK in the immediate postwar period, George Lamming’s 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin and the Saint Lucian economist W. Arthur Lewis’s 1954 essay “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”. Reading these texts against the recent wave of research on the politics and aesthetics of the postcolonial bildungsroman, I argue that Lamming’s novel can be usefully interpreted as an allegory of national formation caught between two distinct models: Bildung, which uses the metaphor of the national body to figure an incipient postcolonial nation-state; and economic “development”, which refigures national growth in terms of liberal modernization. Placing an emphasis on the distinction in these two discourses between a “nation-people” and a national “population”, the article goes on to consider the mythologized figure of the Windrush “exile”, not, or not only, as a heroic individual in pursuit of upward social (and literary) mobility, but as a narrative response to developmentalist ideology in the 1950s.
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