Expensive Shit: Aesthetic Economies of Waste In
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EXPENSIVE SHIT: AESTHETIC ECONOMIES OF WASTE IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA by Sarah L. Lincoln Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Ian Baucom, Supervisor ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna ___________________________ Grant Farred ___________________________ Charles Piot Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2008 ABSTRACT EXPENSIVE SHIT: AESTHETIC ECONOMIES OF WASTE IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA by Sarah L. Lincoln Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Ian Baucom, Supervisor ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna ___________________________ Grant Farred ___________________________ Charles Piot An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2008 Copyright by Sarah L. Lincoln 2008 Abstract 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. 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. 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. Contents Introduction. Africa la Pou/belle ................................................................................................1 Chapter One. Marvelous rottenness: excremental allegory and postcolonial African literature .....................................................................................................................22 Chapter Two. Consumption and dependency in Ousmane Sembène.......................69 2.1 Introduction................................................................................................................69 2.2 Food and other pleasures: enjoyment as a political factor...................................77 2.3 Mandabi: credit and consumption..........................................................................86 2.4 Xala: the remnants of desire...................................................................................118 2.5 Guelwaar: the corrupt body politic.......................................................................131 Chapter Three. Remnants of modernity: petro-magic-realism and inflationary culture in Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew ........................................................................154 Chapter Four. The Aesthetics of Recyling: Zakes Mda’s Prosaic Economies..........194 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................238 Biography ...................................................................................................................252 Introduction. Africa la Pou/belle [T]he archaeological refers to ruin and responses to it, to the mundane and quotidian articulated with grand historical scenarios, to materializations of the experience of history, material aura, senses of place and history, choices of what to keep and what to let go (remember/forget), the material artifact as allegorical, collections and their systems, the city and its material cultural capitalizations (investments in pasts and futures), the intimate connection between all this and a Utopian frame of mind (archaeology is not just about the past, but about desired futures too). And the stuff of it all is garbage. 1 On the morning of August 19, 2006, residents of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, awoke to the overwhelming stench of petroleum, garlic and rotten eggs. The noxious smell, which burned noses and eyes and caused open sores on the skin of babies, was traced to pools of slick black sludge, which had appeared overnight in fields and backyards across the city’s suburbs. As hundreds streamed into clinics and hospitals complaining of headaches, nausea, nosebleeds, stomach pain and skin irritation, the sludge was identified as a potent cocktail of industrial wastes and byproducts of petroleum refining, dumped illegally in leaking drums on open-air sites by a local subsidiary of a Dutch waste-management firm. At least 10 people died from exposure to the toxic waste, while dozens more were hospitalized and over 100,000 sought medical attention. Subsistence farmers lost a whole year’s worth of manioc and corn, and many others were forced to 1 Michael Shanks, David Platt, William L. Rathje. “The perfume of garbage: modernity and the archaeological.” Modernism/Modernity 11(1) (Jan 2004), p.61-83, 85-87 (p. 64). 1 leave their homes; contamination even kept the city’s garbage pickers from their customary work in the “stinking mud” of the Abidjan landfill.2 The task of identifying the source of the waste proved difficult indeed, as its restless circulation across the world’s oceans helped obscure its origins. The sludge was eventually traced to a Panamanian-registered ship, the Probo Koala , chartered by a Swiss oil- and metals trading outfit. If, in Paul Gilroy’s account, the slave ship traces the contours of a Black Atlantic modernity, then we might say that this floating waste barrel similarly sketched the geographic outlines of global postmodernity, plotting a course along the slopes of its uneven economies of profit and waste. The waste, a “toxic brew of cleaning chemicals and gasoline and crude oil slop,” was originally scheduled to be unloaded in Amsterdam, but officials there refused to admit the pungent mixture without payment of a $250,000 disposal fee. 3 The crew was similarly unable to dispose of the waste at its next port of call, in Estonia; after delivering a shipment of petroleum to Nigeria (from where, we might imagine, the original oil likely originated), they managed to find a local Ivoirean company, Tommy, to take the slop off their hands for a fee of only $18,500. The ship’s journey from (occluded third-world origin to) first-world port through former second-world (back) to the unregulated, impotent third world makes the Probo Koala a compelling mobile metonym for the global processes that relegate Africa to 2 Lydia Polgreen and Marlise Simons, “Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast.” The New York Times (October 2, 2006), A1 3 Sebastian Knauer, Thilo Thielke and Gerald Traufetter, “Toxic-Waste Ship “Probo Koala”: Profits for Europe, Industrial Slop for Africa.” Spiegel Magazine (Sept 18, 2006). Available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-437842,00.html (June 2, 2008) 2 the role of waste receptacle for the so-called developed countries. As The New York Times observed in its front-page story about the crisis, “Africa has long been a dumping ground for all sorts of things the developed world has no use for.”4 Two days later, in an editorial entitled “An African Dumping Ground,” the paper decried the global economies that geographically allocated profit and waste based on the relative “cheap”ness of human life. 5 What makes this a particularly interesting case among literally dozens of such incidents is the fact that Cote d’Ivoire was once one of Africa’s most promising countries, featuring a rare combination of political stability, peace and prosperity. By the time of the waste dumping, however, the optimism of the post-Independence decades had given way to bitter pessimism, as economic crisis, corruption, ballooning national debt and years of civil war had eroded any hopes for the country’s successful entry into the ranks of global modernity. As shrinking state