The PosTcolonial inTellecTual This page has been left blank intentionally The Postcolonial intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Context oliver lovesey University of British Columbia-Okanagan, Canada First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Oliver Lovesey 2015 Oliver Lovesey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Lovesey, Oliver, author. The postcolonial intellectual: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in context / by Oliver Lovesey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0900-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1938– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Intellectuals—Kenya. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. 4. Pan-Africanism. 5. Decolonization. I. Title. PR9381.9.N45Z765 2015 823.914—dc23 2014036143 ISBN: 9781409409007 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315554112 (ebk) Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 The Postcolonial Intellectual 1 2 The Decolonization of James Ngũgĩ: Early Journalism 43 3 Diasporic Pan-Africanism: The Caribbean Connection 75 4 Ngũgĩ’s “Aesthetics of Decolonization”: Return to the Source 115 5 Postcolonial Intellectual Self-Fashioning 139 6 The Global Intellectual: Conclusion 173 Works Cited 195 Index 221 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgments A section of Chapter 5 was first published in Research in African Literatures 26.4 (Winter 1995), 31–45, and is reprinted with permission by Indiana University Press. A section of Chapter 6 was first published in Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (2002), 139–168, and it is reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press; Copyright © 2002 for the Purdue Research Foundation. The cover image is a photograph of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o by Nikki Kahn used with permission by the Washington Post via Getty Images. Lavish acknowledgment is extended to Marie Loughlin for keeping everything in context. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 1 The Postcolonial Intellectual Rumors of the death of the intellectual, as Susan Sontag asserts, are greatly exaggerated (110), though the announcement of the intellectual’s demise is itself a “recurrent genre” (Collini 40).1 The somewhat “moldy,” “elitist,” or “obsolete” air of the traditional, universal intellectual (and perhaps especially the professional, institutional, academic intellectual) remains, and there is a perennial discomfort with the term that carries the odor of the candle or the aura of the screen. Much has been written on the role and representation of intellectuals and clearly intellectuals like writing about themselves, though a species of anxiety or self- conscious hand-wringing often informs these reflections. There is a commonly expressed impatience with intellectual work’s apparent or perceived divorce from the material realities of poverty and injustice, if not an outright death wish, as in some of the work of intellectuals as different as Jean-Paul Sartre and Amílcar Cabral. One might be forgiven for thinking that times are nearly always dark for intellectuals.2 For many people, and even some intellectuals, like Edward W. Said, appalled by intellectual hubris,3 the intellectual may be a useless passion. A PMLA Roundtable on Intellectuals was convened in 1997 at a time when the humanities and academia in general were variously described as besieged or beleaguered (Perloff 1129; Miller 1137). Judith Butler, six years later in 2003, would also voice concerns about the role of the traditional intellectual, concerns that in her view are exacerbated for “politically minded intellectuals” in the academy due to anxiety about the effectiveness of their public communications amid “an 1 This genre is accompanied with “ancient rights to a certain hyperbole” and also with the announcement of a new candidacy for a presumptive heir to fill the vacancy of the “absent intellectual” (Collini 40). 2 See Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said writes that “[i]n dark times an intellectual is very often looked to by members of his or her nationality to represent, speak out for, and testify to the sufferings of that nationality” (43). See, too, Julia Kristeva’s “Thinking in Dark Times” in Profession’s “The Role of Intellectuals in the Twenty-First Century” forum. In a memorial reflection on Said’s intellectual mode, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes of the “need for his presence in the current post-9/11 destruction of free society in the United States [which] is teaching us afresh how important he was” (Spivak, “Edward Said” 59). Adrienne Rich in 2006 asserted the need for poetry in the present “dark times” when “I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire” (“Legislators”). 3 Said refers to “the appalling danger of thinking of oneself, one’s views, one’s rectitude, one’s stated positions as all-important,” a species of self-deluded narcissism resembling that often targeted in Swift’s writings (Said, Representations 113).