Quayson’s chapter compares the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1904 with the real-life multilingual city of Accra, Ghana. In these twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts, Quayson finds different forms of epic dreaming and material work. From among these celebrations of the kinetic aspects of urban life, he focuses on advertising billboards and personal slogans and pronouncements, arguing that these slogans and Joyce’s interior linguistic landscape in Ulysses exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari have described as the deterritorialization of language. Quayson draws on these theorists to offer a new way of understanding a central problem of language in Joyce’s writing – the self-interlocution and the relations between external stimuli and internal activities of the mind – and the nature of the Accra streetscape, in which vehicle slogans and inscriptions turn oral discourse into a written text, transforming stigmatized terms of African indigenous languages into co-creative dimensions of English discourse.

This chapter explores the relationship between postcolonialism, diaspora, and world literature. Taking as a starting premise the complex nature of Jorge Luis Borges’s the Library of Babel as a starting point, it traces the shift in critical orientations between Commonwealth Literature to Postcolonial Literature, and looks at the significance of diaspora literary studies in providing new metaphors by which to look to think about circulation both in the library and in the world of population movements more generally. It is suggested the library of the republic of letters is enriched by viewing it as exemplifying these two distinctive modes.

In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

In Beckett’s Murphy in Chapter 9, we find that the eponymous character’s quest for self-validation is an aspect of an autistic spectrum disorder and that it is his relentless attraction to patterns that draws him to Mr. Endon. In the game of chess between Endon and Murphy, it is the former’s refutation of any kind of analogy that spins Murphy out of himself and ultimately leads, in an absurd but also interconnected concatenation of small steps, to his death by a gas explosion in his garret. As in other works of Beckett, our attention is rivetted on the absurd semiotic of language itself as an aspect of hermeneutical delirium. This is closely tied to Murphy’s aporetic speech that is also part of his autistic syndrome. The failure to find a reflection of himself in the mind of Mr. Endon is what ultimately undoes Murphy’s sense of self-integration and triggers his rapid unravelling.

Chapter 2 takes us through the dynamics of the interpellation of Othello’s blackness in the cosmopolitan contexts of Shakespeare’s Othello. The focus is on the effects of Iago’s modularity, that is to say, on his capacity to “make images” and to then use them as the means for eliciting strong emotional reactions from the other characters. I argue that Shakespeare’s inclusion in a book on postcolonial tragedy is guaranteed not because he is himself a postcolonial, but because his work has served to illuminate postcolonial conditions in different epochs and climes. One need only think of the impact The Tempest has had on arguments concerning the appropriation by the colonized of the colonial language itself as a tool to fight back, or the impact of The Merchant of Venice in illuminating the processes of endemic racism and anti-Semitism to be found in many societies today to see that Shakespeare is amenable to many postcolonial applications.

The aesthetics of the self as inextricably linked to an unruly affective economy are explored in Chapter 5 with respect to Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I also highlight the novel’s subtle intertextual arrangements and literary echoes which are part of a larger symphony of mirrorings that form a recurrent principle ramifying at different levels of the text. I track the various references to Othello, Heart of Darkness, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts of the Arab Nahda (renaissance) that are widely interspersed throughout the novel. Finally, I examine Mustafa Sa’eed’s motivation toward self-authorship and the ability to fashion his own identity autonomously and in complete control both of its contingent processes and of their final product. He does this through the deployment of exoticizing orientalist stereotypes, which are rendered completely redundant when he encounters his wife Jean Morris.

In Chapter 7, we find that the characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novels are afflicted by second thoughts in a manner that brings to mind the structure of sceptical interlocution and the abolition of philia that we saw in Fanon. With the particular case of the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, this thought-affliction produces an edginess that is directly related to the character’s unerring perception of the force of the Empire’s ideology and to his sense of having been compromised for being their unwitting agent. As the novel progresses, the Magistrate’s edginess moves from being a feature of his internal interlocution to being defined by his material conditions: he is thrown into jail and tortured. It also impacts on the moral contradictions of his position – having to choose between allegiance to the Empire and care for the barbarian girl. The question of moral residue and ethical choice are carefully examined with respect to the Magistrate.

In Chapter 8, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things dramatizes the tragedy of Ammu, Rahel, and Estha. The children experience profound guilt for their part in the deaths of their cousin Sophie Mol and of Velutha, the god of small things of the title. The deaths are focalized through their eyes and told across two time frames, which serves to give us progressive, if fragmentary, instalments of the collapse of the children’s own internal emotional landscapes. I argue that even though the distribution of the story across two time frames suggests the shape of a fractured bildungsroman, the traumatic events of their childhood so firmly seal them into the discourse of tragedy, that theirs becomes not the story of growing up but rather the teleology of an arrested development. I trace the various ways in which the crises in the social world are metonymically displaced onto that of volatile nature.

The focus of Chapter 3 is mainly on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I argue that the expansion of social subsystems triggered by colonial modernity unfolds against a background of different historical rhythms, not all of which are explicitly foregrounded within the novels. I suggest that these barely visible overlapping histories generate a number of rhetorical sedimentations to the representation of both historical processes and the Igbo ethno-text (ethnographic details) that also illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle disruptions of colonial modernity. To grasp the nature of the multi-synchronous historical character of these texts, I read both the historical and ethnographic details of Achebe’s novels as discursive thresholds rather than as cultural particularities. Thus, the characters Okonkwo and Ezeulu are both victims of historical transformations of which they are barely conscious.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, Okonkwo, Ezeulu, colonial modernity, colonial interpellation, Fanon, foundational narratives, gossip, osu (sacred caste), slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, David Scott, Georg Lukács, the historical novel, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, volatile proximity between different historical lifeworlds, Christianity, ethical choice.

I argue in Chapter 4 that Wole Soyinka’s essentially dramatic gifts are geared more towards anti-mimeticism than towards any form of naturalistic representation and that when staging character and setting in his anti-mimetic plays, he elects a dramatic medium that allows their largely aesthetic-political messages to be communicated through cryptic and often elusive ritual meanings. Thus, in The Road, Professor illustrates a sense of edginess through the amplifying delirium that he experiences in attempting to merge Yorùbá and Christian epistemologies in pursuit of the Word. While Death and the King’s Horseman presents a minute interpretation of the moving parts involved in an error of judgment, reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis that would have been much appreciated by Aristotle. The latter play also illustrates several elements reminiscent of the Greeks, such as a strong degree of disputatiousness, a carefully choreographed chorus-function, and an idea of the pharmakos that aligns sacrifice directly with the welfare of the polis.