Since the end of the Second World War, the British literary canon has enlarged its ambit to include a variety of literary voices coming from marginal social positions. A leading strand of what is commonly referred to as Commonwealth literature is Nigerian literature. Drawing on the Marxist tradition of ideological critique, this course aims to complement existing critical discourses grounded in postcolonial theory, gender studies, and queer theory, and help students understand the relationship between the (self)representation of otherness and the material conditions of labour and production. The course will focus on a selection of fictional texts that cover the period between 1945 and the present, texts which are also representative for the various stages in the development of post-1945 global capitalism.
Primary bibliography:
- Introduction
- From dialectics to dialectic materialism: Hegel and Marx
- Ideology in post-marxism: Louis Althusser
- Postmarxist literary theory: Terry Eagleton
- The stages of global capitalism: fordism, postfordism, the postideological age, the return of ideology after the 2008 financial crisis
- A materialist history of Nigeria after independence
- Postcolonial identity after World War II: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
- Postcolonial identity under neocolonialism: Wole Soiynka, The Interpreters (1965)
- Representing the intersection of race, gender and class under fordism: Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen (1974)
- Postcolonial identity under neoliberalism: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985)
- Postcolonial identity in the postideological age: Ben Okri, In Arcadia (2002)
- Intersectional identities after the 2008 financial crisis: Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
- Conclusions and recapitulation
- Assessment
Primary sources
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Emecheta, Buchi. Second-Class Citizen. 1972. Random House, 2021.
Evaristo, Bernardine. Girl, Woman, Other. Random House, 2019.
Okri, Ben. In Arcadia. 2002. Head of Zeus, 2014.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. 1985. Head of Zeus, 2024.
Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. 1965, Bloomsbury, 2024.
Secondary sources
Adebanwi, Wale, and Ebenezer Obadare, editors. Encountering the Nigerian State. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. Translated by David Fernbach, new ed., Verso, 2015.
Akakpo, Imeta. “The Exploited Body: A Marxist-Feminist Reading of Gender, Labor, and Capital in Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero, and Darko’s Faceless.” Journal of Creative Research in English Literature & Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 2026, pp. 30–34.
Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster, NLB, 1970.
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster, Verso, 2005.
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 2001.
Amin, Ash, editor. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Blackwell, 1994.
Attwell, David. “Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters: Suggestions on Context and History.” English in Africa, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 1981, pp. 59–71. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40238741.
Balogun, F. Odun. “Wole Soyinka and the Literary Aesthetic of African Socialism.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 22, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 503–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2904313.
Baral, Raj Kumar. “Excremental Imageries as the Form of Resistance in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 10, no. 3, June 2019, pp. 21–29.
Bello, Hakeem. The Interpreters: Ritual, Violence, and Social Regeneration in the Writing of Wole Soyinka. Kraft Books, 2014.
Bloom, Harold. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Infobase, 2010.
Bonefeld, Werner, and John Holloway, editors. Post-Fordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State. Macmillan, 1991.
Bourahla, Djelloul. “Modernism in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters.” Al-Athar, no. 8, May 2009, pp. 58–62.
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. Verso, 1978.
Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Routledge, 2002.
Elster, Jon, editor. Karl Marx: A Reader. Cambridge UP, 1986.
Ferretter, Luke. Louis Althusser. Routledge, 2006.
Feuser, Willfried F. “Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 22, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 555–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2904315.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992.
Fulford, Sarah. “Ben Okri, the Aesthetic, and the Problem with Theory.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2009, pp. 233–60. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cls.0.0079.
Hawkes, David. Ideology. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2003.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford UP, 2002.
Husain, Kasim. “Towards Socialism with a Small ‘s’: Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen and the Reconsideration of Welfare State Nostalgia.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 8, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1–22.
Jessop, Bob. “Fordism and Post-Fordism: A Critical Reformulation.” Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by Ash Amin, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 42–62.
Losambe, Lokangaka, and Tanure Ojaide, editors. The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature. Routledge, 2024.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, 1999.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration: Envisioning Language. Palgrave Macmillan.
Macdonald, Bruce. “The Artist in Colonial Society: The Mimic Men and The Interpreters.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1–2, 1982, pp. 20–31. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/00086495.1982.11672000.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Translated by Geoffrey Wall, Routledge, 2006.
Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka. Rodopi, 2007.
Myers, Tony. Slavoj Žižek. Routledge, 2003.
Ngaboh-Smart, Francis. “Re-narrating the Nation: Soyinka’s The Interpreters.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 46, no. 1, Feb. 2010, pp. 42–52. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449850903478163.
Nicholls, Brendon. “An Environmental Unconscious? Nigerian Oil Politics, Autonomous Partial Objects, and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 48, no. 4, 2017, pp. 56–77. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.48.4.05.
Nwagbara, Andrew Ibeawuchi. “Marxist Dialectics and the Nigerian Fiction: The Revolutionary Protagonist in Festus Iyayi’s Heroes.” Icheke Journal of the Faculty of Humanities, vol. 18, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 103–14.
Nwaosu, Chigozirim Miracle. “The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.” The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2025: Official Conference Proceedings, International Academic Forum, 2025, pp. 149–59.
Oduor, Vincent Odhiambo. “Artistry and Post-Colonial Issues in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters.” Editon Consortium Journal of Literature and Linguistic Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, May 2020, pp. 130–42.
Perera-Rajasingham, Nimanthi. “‘Work Is War’: The Biafran War and Neoliberalism in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 48, no. 4, 2017, pp. 1–20. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.48.4.02.
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Strauss, Sara. “Intersectionality and Fourth-Wave Feminism in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 34, no. 1–2, 2023, pp. 14–32. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2184613.
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Wark, McKenzie. Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso, 2019.
Westra, Richard. Periodizing Capitalism and Capitalist Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Wright, Elizabeth, and Edmond Wright, editors. The Žižek Reader. Blackwell, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New ed., Verso, 2008.
