The Location of Critique

This article considers the relationship between formal representations of political violence in postcolonial works of fiction—, and their subsequent canonicity— by tracking the dialectic of obliquity and concreteness in the representation of political violence in postcolonial literature, which offers a blueprint by which to understand the literary market’s reaction to the gradual waning of postcolonial optimism. Locating this dialectic across three sites,— Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg—, this article argues that the literary market has been content to reproduce marketable and fungible forms of literature that paper over the uneasy histories that frustrate optimistic narratives of national coherence and postcolonial development. In the process, historical crises become representative fodder that engages a paradoxical form of historical memory predicated on selective forgetting, which in turn facilitates the rebranding of various postcolonial nations into primarily privatizsed capitalist entities. The article argues that by facilitating this rebranding, postcolonial novels produce the conditions for their canonicity; even those works nominally critical of the subordination of postcolonial states to global capital are almost invariably recruited in this rebranding exercise, such that these novels are transformed by canonisation into objects of their own critique.