A weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalist Bildung: Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s<i>The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born</i>

O'Connell, Hugh Charles

doi:10.1080/17449855.2011.574855

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…Hugh O'Connell has criticized the novel for failing to illustrate the future collectivity; however, I argue that Armah, cautious after the postcolonial letdown, refuses either to describe those 'beautyful ones' yet to emerge, or to make messianic promises regarding the better future-to-arrive, as the purpose of the novel is not to depict a better future, but rather to show how responsibility in the present will keep the future open and undetermined and pregnant with potentiality. 78 inequalities-take seriously her simple request, which 'is nothing more than to think what we are doing'. 80…”

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confidence: 99%

Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

Niemi

2017

Postcolonial Studies

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Born and Hannah Arendt's Notion of Individual Responsibility 'Morality concerns the individual in his singularity'. Hannah Arendt, 'Some Questions of Moral Philosophy' 'all the cool sadness seemed able to do was to raise thoughts of the lonely figure finding it more and more difficult to justify his own honesty'. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Hannah Arendt's unique elaborations on imperialism and totalitarianism have given rise to many polemics during the last decades. In particular, her views on imperialism as a test laboratory for emerging European totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism have been seen as an important early contribution to the corpus of postcolonial theory. 1 Yet at the same time, scholars have clearly shown that Arendt was not straightforwardly an anti-imperialist thinker, and too often implicitly aligned herself with the viewpoints of colonizers confronted by unknown and 'uncivilized' cultures in Africa, and thus unfortunately maintained a Eurocentric approach to African cultures. 2 The work in question, particularly in its historical details, often remains vague, but the strength of The Origins, as with her whole oeuvre, lies not in its historical exactness, but rather in its bold attempt to create connections and to think anew; thus I claim that it is particularly Arendt's idea of radical thinking that we need again in our globalized world plagued with structural inequalities. I maintain further that regardless of her unfortunate Eurocentric remarks, the theoretical tools concerning political philosophy, totalitarianism, and imperialism that she provided remain vitally important for researchers focusing on African cultures and their current political problems.

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confidence: 99%

Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

Niemi

2017

Postcolonial Studies

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Mutating Toward the Future: The Convergence of Utopianism, Postcolonial SF, and the Postcontemporary Longing for Form in Amitav Ghosh’s the Calcutta Chromosome

O'Connell¹

2012

mfs

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This article examines the way that secrecy and silence are raised from the level of colonial imposition to postcolonial methodology in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Drawing on Ghosh’s claim that any attempt at forming a counter-modernity to the experience of imperial modernization would necessarily have had to operate without record, it argues that silence and secrecy form a counter-hegemonic practice to the instrumentalizing form of Western rationality. As such, the novel performs a postcolonial decentering of futuricity from Western capitalist epistemology, eschewing a mastery of the past to reopen the possibility of a future beyond imperial logic.

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Re-visioning Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Using Wmatrix

Bonsu,

Nkansah

2024

Íkala

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The numerous literary explorations of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels reveal his aesthetic creativity and relevance in addressing African and diasporic issues that have contemporary relevance. Guided by two objectives, this corpus study set out to analyse the narration and thematisation of Armah’s Fragments (1970) through part-of-speech and semantic domain tags using Wmatrix. We compared Fragments as a target corpus with two other novels by Armah. Results of the analysis suggest that Armah alternates between homodiegetic narrative in character dialogues and monologues, which dominate the main heterodiegetic discourse narration. He also provides a critical perspective on the immediacy of a historic and instantaneous present by giving a specific past account that projects a possible continuity of events in Ghana and Africa. Additionally, Armah discusses the geographic mobility of characters as a metaphor for a quest for a place of being and identity. These findings illustrate the value of applying computational tools like Wmatrix to examine African literary texts and provide a base for further studies.

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A weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalist Bildung: Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah’sThe Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Cited by 5 publications

References 7 publications

Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

Mutating Toward the Future: The Convergence of Utopianism, Postcolonial SF, and the Postcontemporary Longing for Form in Amitav Ghosh’s the Calcutta Chromosome

Re-visioning Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Using Wmatrix

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