Et in arcadia ego, postcolonially : relocations of culture and subjectivity in Ben Okri's fiction

Abstract

The idea behind this thesis stems from an awareness that, over the past ten years in particular, a critical questioning within the field of postcolonialist thought has been gathering momentum: several critics have been interrogating, through various approaches and to different extents, the raison d'etre of postcolonialism itself. A major critical development within this field, that became known as 'postcolonial theory' has come under heavy criticism. Many critics have hinted that this theoretical effort that flourished in the nineteen eighties and the early nineties is now experiencing a disenchantment, even an intellectual stupor, arising from its 'institutional apotheosis'. Others have deemed the prospect of a "Requiem" for postcolonialism to be too overstated and premature. But some have suggested it is high time that present forms of postcolonial subjectivity, agency and cultural representation should be identified in other sources, such as fiction, that operate outside these established or "orthodox" theoretical outlooks. This thesis utilizes the work of Ben Okri as a fictional paradigm, and analyses the fiction's relation to some of the salient formulations of subjectivity and cultural representation within postcolonial theory. The three chapters in Part 1 review a number of main critical and theoretical tenets of Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha. The first two chapters suggest that there are elements of Okri' s The Famished Road trilogy that can be read as reworkings of Said's and Spivak's formulations in fictional terms, while other fictional instances appear to function "in excess" of the critical stances. The third chapter, however, establishes the intimate link between Homi Bhabha' s 'postcolonial subject' and the trilogy's central narrative consciousness, suggesting that the affinity between them exemplifies an inextricable, even if unwitting relation between the fictional and the theoretical perceptions of the subject.