AustLit

'This Ordinary Issue brings together articles that range geographically from Africa to India and historically from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, addressing short stories, novels, social media and journalistic writing. They share an interest in the politics of representation, genre and aesthetics, moving from pressing issues of world politics to the formal issues of representation. The issue starts with Dobrota Pucherova’s “Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as a Postcommunist Novel”, which discusses the Marxist core of Ngũgĩ’s writing in the context of his growing scepticism about the role played by African socialism while simultaneously trying to retain his neo-Marxist advocacy of working-class rights. Pucherova places the novel in relation to works by postcommunist writers, and the “postcommunist picaresque novel”, which critiques both communist and capitalist narratives. Analysing the manner in which modernity is figured across Ngũgĩ’s literary work, Pucherova draws on research from sociology and political science to argue that global forces of capitalism are presented in Wizard of the Crow as political players that disenfranchise those formerly colonized. The novel presents the power of the political as a force that stifles revolutionary impulses. The resulting sense of disempowerment is reinforced by the novel’s multiple narrators, who struggle for control of the text. The article closes with a reading of some recent postcommunist novels from former eastern bloc countries that take a similarly critical look at politics before and after the Cold War.' (Editor's note : introduction)