Utopian Generations develops a powerful interpretive matrix for
understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and
postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework,
within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has
commonly been seen as representationally naïve vis-à-vis modernism, and
canonical modernism as reactionary vis-à-vis postcolonial literature.
What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is
their disposition toward Utopia or "the horizon of a radical
reconfiguration of social relations.?
Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition,
this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial
displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's "internal
limit" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital)
onto a geographic division of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole
genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from
both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different
modes of Utopian aesthetic practice. The theory of world literature
developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings
at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh
Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary
dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically
reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the
Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture.
