What does it actually mean to read for justice and what might this entail? Yoking a wide range of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives and hard-won critical insights, this chapter argues that decolonizing the curriculum is not simply additive (”just add Achebe!”). Decolonization provides a vocabulary by which new knowledges of human development may help to reshape the literary curriculum in the direction of greater sensitivity to urgent racial and social justice issues in today’s world. The chapter examines pathways for this change through detailed readings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (and Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic adaptation), and an examination of the politics of comparison.

Lagos has always been an exceptional site in the Nigerian, African and world imaginary. Both the colonial capital and present-day economic centre of Africa’s most populous nation, Lagos is itself a world. It is therefore no surprise that the city has become a key site through which the world literary imaginary has unfurled, with numerous depictions, projections and imaginative instantiations of the city functioning as a fulcrum around which the contours of world-formation (mondialisation) and contestation have emerged. This chapter explores this rich literary history, conceiving of Lagosian space as a limit case for the wider operations of world-formation in World Literature across the long twentieth century. The chapter is attuned to the articulations and registrations which obtain between the material evolution of the city and its literary image, as well as the larger economic, political and social fields which subtend a range of literary forms. As a mega-city amongst mega-cities, Lagos functions as a setting particularly apt to a wide and often-incongruous range of worldly projections and world formations which lend considerable nuance to the map of World Literature.

This essay explores how the African novel has confronted the problem of nation and nationalism. While Europe had centuries to adapt to the centrifugal processes of nation formation, Africa had no such luxury of time. The work of nationhood in Africa was a shock imposition, and this shock was captured by African writers in and as storytelling of fragmentation, disruption, and the eventual dissociation of the protagonists from the project of national and individual psychological development. African writers’ turn to the interior – in novels, epics, or praise-songs – was, in fact, a political gesture. Bringing into discussion writers from René Maran to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola to Ahmadou Kourouma, Maryse Condé, as well as writers associated with the Afropolitan like Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, this chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century African literature fought to find the space in which the complex dialectic engagement between the individual psyche and the world can be staged and reimagined.

In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

The focus of Chapter 3 is mainly on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I argue that the expansion of social subsystems triggered by colonial modernity unfolds against a background of different historical rhythms, not all of which are explicitly foregrounded within the novels. I suggest that these barely visible overlapping histories generate a number of rhetorical sedimentations to the representation of both historical processes and the Igbo ethno-text (ethnographic details) that also illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle disruptions of colonial modernity. To grasp the nature of the multi-synchronous historical character of these texts, I read both the historical and ethnographic details of Achebe’s novels as discursive thresholds rather than as cultural particularities. Thus, the characters Okonkwo and Ezeulu are both victims of historical transformations of which they are barely conscious.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, Okonkwo, Ezeulu, colonial modernity, colonial interpellation, Fanon, foundational narratives, gossip, osu (sacred caste), slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, David Scott, Georg Lukács, the historical novel, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, volatile proximity between different historical lifeworlds, Christianity, ethical choice.

Chapter 10 lays out the primary methodological motivations behind the book. Because both postcolonialism and tragedy are highly complex, constellation concepts, I argue that they instigate the necessity for thinking closely about the dynamics of comparison, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, and the ethics of reading. I then track the complex relations between historical context and literary texts in postcolonial studies and go on to show some of the ways in which the contrast and comparison of Western notions of tragedy with postcolonial examples forces us to rethink both sides of the coin. I conclude with remarks on the characterological types we have seen in the course of the book – namely the bold (Othello, Okonkwo, Sethe) and the quiet (the Magistrate and Murphy) – and show how they correlate to two different ideas of freedom. There are implications to be derived from postcolonial tragedy for how we think of freedom in today’s world.

“Decolonizing Ecology,” addresses environmental recovery efforts after WWII leading up to the explosion of environmental movements in the 1960s. With a pivot to rhetoric of “recovery” and “regeneration,” nature protection gained national validation with the establishment of the Nature Conservancy. Coinciding with this inward turn, however, the formation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ensured the United Kingdom’s continued involvement in foreign lands. I look to Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel No Longer at Ease to complicate the unevenness of environmental recovery in relation to decolonization. Through a juxtaposition of main character Obiajulu, whose name means “the mind at last is at rest,” and Mr. Green, a 1950s counterpoint to Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz, I explore modernism’s environmental legacy in regard to the end of colonialism and a newly emerging “green imperialism” that seeks to manage natural spaces on a global scale.