Affectability, temporality, and postcolonial subjectification in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Abstract

This article engages with Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to examine what happens when the promise of future-making, conceptually restored with independence, confronts an unchanged, unchangeable present? I argue that Armah’s novel positions affect and affectability as the primary mode of subjectification and subjugation in the postcolony. More specifically, I show how the novel advances a postcolonial theory of affect that scrutinizes the progressivist temporal politics that founds the postcolonial state and the affective economies that sustain it. In turn, I argue that disaffection becomes the primary way the novel resists the progressivist ethos of the postcolony as it enables Armah’s protagonist to reckon with the tragedy of freedoms unrealized and recognize himself as a subject in and of history.

Keywords:

• Armah
• Ghana
• affect
• affectability
• subjectification
• temporality
• postcolony
• horizons

Acknowledgements

The author would like to offer her gratitude to Natalie Melas who provided invaluable feedback at several stages of this project as well as to the participants of the graduate student roundtable of the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. The feedback from the two anonymous reviewers for JALA has greatly strengthened this project.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared.

Notes

1 Subjectification as theorized by Michel Foucault refers to the relations of power that act on individuals to produce particular kinds of subjects. In developing a theory of subjectification, Foucault wanted us to get away from a “juridico-discursive” notion of power as that which forbids the subject from acting a certain way. Instead, for Foucault power “incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon a subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action” (789). In other words, subjectification alerts us to the ways in which power is productive and not just repressive, where subjects emerge through specific forms of the power-knowledge nexus.

2 There is an argument to be made for distinguishing the horizon as such from the telos of postcolonial progress. It is possible, even desirable to want to rescue a certain utopic gesture of the horizon from the grammars of progress that are inevitably implicated in the logic of capitalism. But while I share the impulse to want to retain a theoretical and political distance between the two concepts, the novel itself is not as readily invested in this recuperative gesture. Or rather, the slippage the text introduces between the two temporal concepts attests to the fact that because of the material conditions of the postcolony the utopic imaginings of the horizon are always already refracted through the language of progress.

3 In Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, Lazarus asserts that Armah belongs to a generation of anticolonial intellectuals whose writings post-independence struggled to cope with the disillusionment of its promises because they mistook independence for revolution. According to Lazarus, Beautyful Ones is illustrative of this phenomenon which Armah unlearns in his later works. However, by paying attention to the minute perceptual and psychic changes that the man undergoes, we can witness how already in this first novel Armah moves away from the framework of utopia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Farah Bakaari

Farah Bakaari is a doctoral student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.