Abstract

This dissertation is located at the intersection of three discursive sites and moments: the philosophical discourse of modernity in contemporary Euro-American social theory; current Anglo-American cultural criticism in its "postcolonial" vector; and Africanist literary criticism. Chapter One examines rhetorical maneuvers dramatized in selected texts from Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. I demonstrate the sense in which all four bear witness to some of the inconsistencies sustaining the notion of modernity and its representation. I foreground, also, the ways in which they illuminate questions of epistemology and what I call the will to theory, questions that current literary theory and cultural criticism would do well to entertain. ;Chapter Two takes up the rubric of "postcoloniality" in Anglo-American cultural criticism. In such critics as Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, Gayatri Spivak, and Helen Tiffin, I identify a will to theory marked by a constitutive impasse. Often proceeding with the ambition to theorize an a priori postcolonial condition and text, the critics I discuss can only end up sacrificing close analytical attention to specific colonial histories and conjunctures. ;Chapter Three focusses on one such conjuncture: the criticism of anglophone African Literature and its imbrication with the politics of decolonization from about the late-fifties. I identify two approaches that enabled the Africanist struggle for critical self-representation, namely, "intrinsic" criticism, and its "extrinsic" antithesis. Historicizing the measure and limits of these approaches, I suggest the pertinence of a conceptual insertion of Africanist Literature and criticism within the broader problematic of modernity. I then develop this suggestion by attending to moments of contradictory double-discursivity in Sol Plaatje's Mhudi and D. O. Fagunwa's The Forest of a Thousand Daemons . Insofar as the promise of modernity sponsors Plaatje's and Fagunwa's vision, to trace both writers' textual predicament--in all its tensions--is to trace a motion of immanent critique, a powerful demystification, that is, of the ideology of modernity itself