Unsettling the coloniality of power: form, grievability, and futurity in Opoku-Agyemang’s<i>Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems</i>(1996)

Asempasah, Rogers; Saboro, Emmanuel

doi:10.1080/23311983.2021.1993596

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…2 This is not to suggest that literature's capacity to think otherwise is limited to works that revolve specifically around plagues and pandemics. Fictional works not based on plagues have been crucial to the way we think, especially about possible futures (see Asempasah and Saboro 2021;Asempasah 2019;Bloch 1986;Jameson 1986;2005;Smith 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking a Post-coronavirus Africa: Reading Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon in the Era of Covid-19

Asempasah

2022

jla

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The coronavirus pandemic has exposed Africa’s precarious position within the global system. Once again, Africa is looking to the West for salvation in the form of vaccines and loans. Beyond the economic crisis, however, perhaps the most telling impact of the pandemic is not death but the shame of being postcolonial — a shame that arises from the painful realization that postcolonial is a condition of dependency. There is therefore a growing a critical voice on a post-coronavirus world. However, much of the discussion is taking place in the sciences and the social sciences, to the neglect of the humanities, especially literature. This paper addresses this lacuna by arguing that Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995) can help us think a post-coronavirus Africa. Focusing specifically on the title of the novel as encapsulating a narrative of crisis that decolonizes the “beyond” and a subtle pedagogy on how to transcend postcolonial conceptual and material dependency on the West, the paper argues that Darko’s exploration of the shame of being postcolonial and postcolonial liberation is relevant to thinking about a post Covid-19 Africa. It concludes that Darko’s ethico-political vision is located in her subtle affirmation of Fanon’s call on Third World countries to strategically delink from Europe and the West in order to realize and inaugurate a genuine postcoloniality.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%