Editor’s note

Abstract

This Ordinary Issue brings together articles that range geographically from Africa to India and historically from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, addressing short stories, novels, social media and journalistic writing. They share an interest in the politics of representation, genre and aesthetics, moving from pressing issues of world politics to the formal issues of representation. The issue starts with Dobrota Pucherova’s “Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as a Postcommunist Novel”, which discusses the Marxist core of Ngũgĩ’s writing in the context of his growing scepticism about the role played by African socialism while simultaneously trying to retain his neo-Marxist advocacy of working-class rights. Pucherova places the novel in relation to works by postcommunist writers, and the “postcommunist picaresque novel”, which critiques both communist and capitalist narratives. Analysing the manner in which modernity is figured across Ngũgĩ’s literary work, Pucherova draws on research from sociology and political science to argue that global forces of capitalism are presented in Wizard of the Crow as political players that disenfranchise those formerly colonized. The novel presents the power of the political as a force that stifles revolutionary impulses. The resulting sense of disempowerment is reinforced by the novel’s multiple narrators, who struggle for control of the text. The article closes with a reading of some recent postcommunist novels from former eastern bloc countries that take a similarly critical look at politics before and after the Cold War. Filippo Menozzi, in “Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness and the Question of Realism”, presents Roy’s second novel in the context of her politics of writing and her resultant commitment to realism. Discussing how Roy’s political engagement informs the technique of her novel, the article sees in this text an “aesthetic of the inconsolable”. Like other recent scholarship published in this journal and elsewhere, Menozzi’s article asks about the relationship between postcolonial literature and the political reality, reflecting in particular on the generic and formal properties of writing that oscillates between factual and fictional means of representation, frequently resisting clear identifications, as, for instance, in Roy’s political essays. Menozzi points to Roy’s use of metafictional elements. One of the key characters, Anjum, embodies through his hermaphroditic corporeality the way that experience eludes simple forms of representation. By blending her own invented characters with figures clearly drawn from historical reality, Roy simultaneously engages with realist writing while undermining it, turning to documentary and political digression in an attempt to link her fictional characters more directly to the actual politics of India. The article closes with reflections on the ethics of representation, asking how Roy views the tension between fictionalization and suffering. Menozzi suggests that she specifically turns to digressive and self-questioning forms of realism in order to avoid any suspicion of exploitation: by JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL WRITING 2019, VOL. 55, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1590937