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<p>This dissertation proposes a reading of postcolonial African literature in light
of the continent's continued status as a "remnant" of globalization--a waste product,
trash heap, disposable raw material, and degraded offcut of the processes that have
so greatly enriched, dignified and beautified their beneficiaries. The "excremental"
vision of African authors, poets and filmmakers reflects their critical consciousness
of the imbalances and injustices that characterize African societies and polities
under pressure from monetized capitalism and domestic corruption. The figure of superfluity,
excess, destruction or extravagance--concepts gathered together under the sign of
"waste"--is a central thematic, symbolic, and formal feature of many postcolonial
African works, and I suggest that literature functions in this context to document,
critique, and offer alternatives to the culture of waste that predominates in political
and social life on the continent. </p><p>The argument covers a range of geographical
and historical ground, from the "excremental" preoccupations and stylistics of early
postcolonial African fiction, to contemporary South Africa, where political anxieties
about the relative superfluity of entire populations to the project of neoliberal
development are articulated through the aesthetic challenges of representing the past
while remaining open to productive futurity. Through chapters on excremental literature
and the politics of allegory; corruption, debt and economy in Senegalese film; magical
realism and inflation in Nigeria; and recycling and aesthetics in transitional South
Africa, I argue for a reading of postcolonial African fiction as a mode of political
ecology, an aesthetics that draws its energies directly from the problem of waste
management figured in the works. </p><p>Drawing on theoretical perspectives from Walter
Benjamin and postcolonial marxism to poststructuralist literary philosophy, the "new
economic criticism," and psychoanalysis, I investigate how African artists themselves
make sense of the continent's increasing superfluity to the global economy, its role
only as "la poubelle"--the world's trash heap--where toxic waste and excess capital
alike are sent to die.</p>
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