Unmasking communism: Ayi Kwei Armah, black Marxism, and the cultural turn, 1967-1984

ABSTRACT

Can the repudiation of Eurocentric Marxism and embrace of Afrocentrism in Ayi Kwei Armah’s essays explain his shift from writing realist to historical novels? Contextualizing Armah’s work in relation to the global cultural turn in the second half of the twentieth century, this article understands his critique of racial capitalism and program of re-Africanization as a black Marxism. It then explains Armah’s embrace of the form of the historical novel in Two Thousand Seasons via a reading of Fragments, which allegorizes a key political and aesthetic contradiction: the changes in culture and consciousness requisite for decolonization cannot occur within the established structures of representation. Reading Armah’s historical novels through the black Marxism of his essays indicates the horizons of his work for Marxist approaches to African literature today and remains important for understanding the legacy of revolutionary Fanonism.

KEYWORDS:

• Ayi Kwei Armah
• Marxism
• cultural turn
• racial capitalism
• Frantz Fanon

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the insightful comments of the editor of this special issue, Alexander Fyfe, as well as two anonymous readers. For constructive discussions and encouragement, I am grateful to Christopher Warnes and Malachi McIntosh, as well as the members of the Latitudes Working Group at the University of Pennsylvania, particularly Ajay Kumar Batra, Ania Loomba, Augusta Atinuke Irele, Jed Esty, and Rita Barnard. I would also like to thank Clinton Williamson, Daniel Davies, Elias Rodriques and Emma Teitelman for their assistance and support.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I derive my understanding of the connections between cultural turns around the world between 1945 and 1989 from Denning (2004), which makes the striking observation that culture moved into the foreground of analysis at the same moment that political thinkers imagined that the world was divided into three parts. By using the phrase ‘black Marxism,’ I analogize Armah’s engagement with Marxism to that of Cedric Robinson. His Black Marxism (Robinson, 2000) shows how the spatial proliferation of capitalism reveals the Eurocentrism and incoherency of Marx’s thinking on race, class and insurrection, and develops a lineage of black cultural radicalism in response to the disappointments of mainstream socialist thought.

2. My understanding of apposition is indebted to Kazanjian (2016, pp. 9–10). My use of the term and its cognates responds to the challenging ‘worldedness’ of the Sixties, which according to Connery is ‘one of links and co-presence’ in contrast to the ‘coordinated worldedness of the Comintern’ or ‘globalization’ as understood in the 1990s (Connery, 2007, pp. 78–79).

3. The limitations of this view derive in part from what these critics cite in relation to the so-called debate about race and class, in which Wole Soyinka plays an outsized role. Marxism and African Literature admits to an ‘anti-Soyinka bias’ (Gugelberger, 1986, p. iv), derived from Marxist critiques of his ethnocentric interpretative category of the ‘African’ (see Newell, 2006, pp. 159–169). Amuta establishes the priority of class critique against the strategies for cultural decolonization proffered by Chinweizu and Madubuike (1983), who were also in conversation with Soyinka (see Gugelberger, 1986, p. 4). The ‘race’ in the debate, then, is Soyinka’s essentialist ethno-category rather than a social fact that indexes cultural, political and economic processes.

4. With the exception of O. S. Ogede (1992), Armah’s essays have received little sustained attention.

5. Other critics observe Armah’s affinities for Fanon. Fraser recognizes that Fanon motivates Armah’s explanation of the cultural blockages to African liberation, but does little more than assert that Fanon provides a hermeneutic for neo-colonialism (Fraser, 1980, p. 9–10). Wright observes the differences between Armah and Fanon’s political analysis, and argues that Armah gives aesthetic form to Fanon’s psychoanalytical conception of neo-colonialism and blackness, but, as his aim is merely to establish Fanon’s influence as an African thinker on Armah, he does not consider Armah’s intellectual development in light of this relationship (Wright, 1989, pp. 35–51).

6. Lindfors similarly critiques the ‘anti-racist racism’ of Armah’s historical novels (Lindfors, 1980, p. 90). My argument disagrees with this assessment but does not follow Ogede in positively equating Armah’s philosophy with Négritude (O. Ogede, 2000).

7. Armah is absent from Gordon et al.’s (1996) overview of the four stages of ‘Fanon studies,’ but he surely belongs to the first stage, which comprises initial reactions to and applications of Fanon’s work by Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara, Huey Newton, Paulo Freire, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Nguyen Nghe, and Jack Woddis.

8. For an overview of the scholarship on the relationship between Marxism and Fanonism, see R. Rabaka (2010, pp. 145–215).

9. On this dichotomy, see Lazarus (2012, pp. 161–182).

10. Armah’s essays intervene in long-running debates about the ideological and institutional relationship between communism and pan-Africanism, which stretch back to the proclamation of the Third International (1919–1943) in 1922 that ‘the Negro problem has become a vital question of the world revolution’ (Adi, 2018, p. 65). For more on this history, which effected the way that communists and pan-Africanists conceptualized national identity, created Africanist movements that underpinned Nkrumah’s bid for independence, and related to the 1955 Bandung Conference, see Adi (2018) and Kelley (2002). On the relationship between this history and black Marxism, see Edwards (2001).

11. On the promise of Nkrumahism as a characteristically modern, see Ahlman (2017).

12. Armah critiques Wallerstein (1961). For a more recent restatement of world-systems theory, see Wallerstein (2004).

13. On the discursivity of Fanon’s texts, see Gates (1991) and S. Hall (1996).

14. For Armah’s biography, see Fenderson (2008).

15. On the breadth of discussion about decolonization in Présence Africaine, see Mudimbe (1992).

16. For more on the possibilities of this lineage of black radical thought, see R. Rabaka (2009).

17. For recent work on black Marxism, see Johnson and Lubin (2017).

18. For an alternative reading of Fragments as an index of belated trauma from the slave trade, see Murphy (2012, pp. 106–132).

19. I borrow the idea of a critical ‘problem space’ from the work of David Scott, who encourages us to consider the relationship between anticolonial questions and strategies and how it effects our critical emplotments of postcolonial pasts, presents and futures. For more, see Scott (1999, 2004).

20. On Afropolitanism as breaking with the intellectual history of emancipatory politics in African studies, see Balakrishnan (2017). On the relationship between Afropolitanism and Pan-Africanism, see Balakrishnan (2016).

21. See, for instance, El Hamel (2013), B. S. Hall (2011), Pierre (2013), and Ray (2015).

22. For examples of recent efforts to rethink the Bandung era and third-worldism, see Lee (2010), Phạm and Shilliam (2016), and Prashad (2008). For analogous work on Afro-Asian solidarities in particular, see Shih (2016), and Jones and Singh (2003). For new approaches to the black Atlantic, see Getachew (2019), Jaji (2014), Kazanjian (2016) and Wilder (2015).

23. It also underscores Greg Forter’s contention that postcolonial historical fiction develops ‘critical maps of colonialism’ and envisions corresponding projects of utopia (Forter, 2019, p. 2).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Bartels-Swindells

Aaron Bartels-Swindells is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.