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

• Published in: Journal of postcolonial writing 2012-09, Vol.48 (4), p.371-383
• Main Author: O'Connell, Hugh Charles
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ayi Kwei Armah; messianicity without messianism; negative dialectics; postcolonial Bildung; postcolonial nationalism; utopianism
• ISSN: 1744-9855; 1744-9863
• DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2011.574855

Most criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah's 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has concentrated on the pessimistic aspects of the text, highlighting the failures of postcolonial nationalist movements, and ranking Armah's work "among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during the first decade of independence in Africa" (Lazarus, "(Re)turn to the People" in The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, ed. Charles Cantalupo [Trenton, NJ: African World, 1995]). This article contests such readings and works towards the recovery of a latent, weak utopianism that works similarly to Derrida's conception of messianicity without messianism and the promise for the event yet to-come. Instead of viewing the novel as an historical account of the failures of postcolonial nationalism, this weak-utopian reading privileges the promise and possibility that arise from the text itself. Thus the article underscores the need for a negative dialectical or weak-utopian politics, recognizing, in Adorno's words, the "consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately [ ... ], the creation of a reconciled non-identity" (55).