Spectres of a petrostate: critical irrealism and social contradiction in Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes

ABSTRACT

Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács’ theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of ‘critical irrealism’, which emphasised the fact that there were many non-realist works of art that contained powerful critiques of the social order. More recently, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) have taken up Löwy’s arguments to work out the implications of critical irrealism for world-systems analysis and Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development. This paper seeks to critically evaluate the WReC’s theorisation of critical irrealism through a reading of Angolan author Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes. Recently published in English translation as Transparent City (2018), Ondjaki’s novel is centred on a protagonist who is in the process of becoming transparent. As the novel’s most salient non-realist features become a means of launching a trenchant social critique against the institutionalised corruption and industrial malpractice of Angola’s ‘petroleum dictatorship’, it seems as if the text corroborates the WReC’s conception of irrealist aesthetics as the determinate formal register of (semi-)peripherality in the capitalist world-system. However, as a category with its conceptual foundations rooted in the tradition of western European literary realism and modernism, is the relevance of critical irrealism for African literature inherently limited? Might not the persistence of oral traditions and non-European epistemologies within texts like Os Transparentes render irrealism obsolete as an analytical category for literature produced under non-European social conditions? Opening with a re-reading of the concept of critical irrealism, this paper argues that the reformulation of Marxist concepts in African contexts is a productive if not vexed theoretical exercise.

KEYWORDS:

• World literature
• Marxism
• African literature
• WReC
• neoliberalism
• petroculture

Acknowledgments

For their comments on an earlier version of this article, I would like to thank Shital Pravinchandra and Adhira Mangalagiri. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers for African Identities for their cogent critiques and suggestions without which this article would be significantly worse off.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The most extensive engagement with the theoretical framework of the WReC’s work can be found in the forum set up in 2016 by the journal Comparative Literature Studies, which allowed for six scholars of world literature to make cogent and wide-ranging critiques of the arguments made in Combined and Uneven Development (Harlow et al. 2016). With the WReC’s reply printed alongside these critiques (Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 2016), a productive dialogue of ideas emerged which signalled new departures for world-literary studies and problematised already-existing paradigms. At the same time, some of the WReC’s most fundamental analytical propositions came out of the discussion relatively untouched.

2. For a discussion of the lasting importance of Lukács’ conception of realism see (Jameson, 1977/2007) (in particular pp. 211–13), where he argues that Lukácsian realism is significant in the context of late capitalism seeing as it has the potential to enact ‘a violent renewal of perception in a world in which experience has solidified into a mass of habits and automatisms’ (p. 213). For a discussion of the extent to which Lukács’ work on realism – which is often reduced to a mere tool in the political struggles of the 1930s – represents a response to a constellation of philosophical and political problems obtaining at the time he wrote his texts, see (Tihanov, 2000). For a challenge to the commonly held assumption that Lukács was engaged in a normative, epistemologically inflexible ‘realist project’, see (Hohendahl, 2012) (in particular pp. 90–92).

3. This critique was, by the way, common among right-wing voices of Huxley’s time such as Heidegger, T.S. Eliot and Ortega y Gasset, who were plagued by social and political anxieties associated with ‘the masses’. Fredric Jameson has described Brave New World as the ‘epic poem’ of such right-wing critiques, elsewhere characterising the novel as ‘an aristocratic critique of the media and mass culture’ (Jameson, 2007, pp. 207, 202, fn. 36).

4. To this extent, perhaps Brave New World is not as critical as Löwy makes out.

5. A moiety is an anthropological term referring to a form of dual social organisation created in order to appease social relations within and between ethnic groups (Lévi-Strauss, 1963/1977, p. 10).

6. The chronologically disruptive effects of combined and uneven development are arguably more clearly implied in Trotsky’s notion of ‘the skipping of historical stages’: a process he saw in evidence in contemporary Russia whereby a disordering of the classic Marxist schema for the development of industry (handicraft, manufacture, factory) gave rise to precisely this mishmash of archaic and contemporary social formations (Trotsky, 1919/2005, p. 223). For a more recent example of combined and uneven development, see Allinson and Anievas’ characterisation of modern-day China’s politico-economic development as a ‘“combination” of different phases of capitalist development – “competitive”, “monopoly”, “neo-liberal”, etc. – compressed within particularly concentrated periods of time’ (Allinson & Anievas, 2009, p. 52).

7. In fact, it is in the writings of Benita Parry, one of the WReC’s senior members, that we find a long and persuasive list of these sorts of resistive local specificities. See, for example, Parry (2004, p. 83).

8. However, see also the three important counter-critiques to Frank’s argument by eminent world-systems analysts Samir Amin (1999), Giovanni Arrighi (1999) and Wallerstein himself (1999) in the same 1999 issue of the journal Review (Fernand Braudel Center).

9. A similar critique is made by Janet Abu-Lughod in her magisterial study Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Abu-Lughod, 1989). Here Abu-Lughod takes Wallerstein to task for his ‘distressingly imprecise’ definition of the modern world-system that tendentially overlooks the many world-economies that predated and enabled the emergence of European capitalist expansion (pp. 38, 11). Indeed, had there not existed these numerous preexistent world-economies, she writes, ‘when Europe gradually “reached out,” it would have grasped empty space rather than riches’ (p. 12). Wallerstein’s ‘failure to begin the story early enough’, Abu-Lughod concludes, ‘has resulted in a truncated and distorted causal explanation for the rise of the west’ (p. 20). As Timothy Brennan has noted, these sorts of critique of world-systems analysis have major implications for the recent ‘sociological turn’ in world-literary studies, and it is in this sense that they are taken up here (Brennan, 2019, p. 27). Indeed, like world-systems analysis, critical irrealism might be said to contain a type of immanent Eurocentrism.

10. Perhaps the most glaring intellectual difference between the approaches of the WReC and Laachir et al. is the latter’s emphasis on difference – cultural, linguistic, geographical – and their concomitant critique of ‘meta-categories such as “world” and “global”’ (p. 1). Laachir et al. contend that the concept of ‘significant geographies’ is preferable over such meta-categories, referring as it does to ‘the wider conceptual, imaginative and real geographies that texts, authors and language communities inhabit, produce and reach out to’ (p. 5). The problems implicit in categories such as ‘world’ are for these authors its claims of ‘systemic integration’ that are ‘warranted by universalist categories of economic discourse’ (p. 2), and their attempt to overcome these obstacles is accordingly made via appeal to the socio-cultural specificity of location. Here Laachir et al. and the WReC could not be further from each other in theoretical and methodological terms. While the WReC approach the ‘problem’ (Moretti’s term) of world literature from a materialist perspective that appeals to the category of totality and systemic integration, Laachir et al. are averse to such ‘universalist’ approaches and they thus advance a conception of world literature is that is more ‘located’.

11. All translations in this paper are my own.

12. For a helpful discussion of these Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) see Lazarus (2004, p. 37).

13. In the context of these intra-national tensions between the urban MPLA and FNLA parties and the rural UNITA, it is hard not to recall Frantz Fanon’s (contentious) assessment of the ‘bourgeois’ nature of many nationalist parties and their largely metropolitan, working-class base (Fanon, 1961/1990, p. 87). As Fanon’s analysis suggests, the class tensions between MPLA, FNLA and UNITA were a structural condition of African liberation movements, not circumstantial to the Angolan situation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Waller

Thomas Waller is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham researching Portuguese-language African literatures and cinemas with a particular focus on the cultural production of Angola and Mozambique. Working within the analytical framework of the world-systems tradition, his research looks at the ways in which cultural production from Portuguese-speaking Africa registers a tension between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’, seen for example in the conflict between local social conditions and a global cultural and economic agenda. His thesis will be a comparative study of literary genre in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa, in which he engages the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism and materialist theories of world literature in order to argue that literary production in this region has developed distinctive aesthetic idioms that critically respond to crises in global capitalism and related failures in postcolonial governance