TY - JOUR
T1 - Between imagination and delusion
T2 - Cosmopolitan postcolonial critique in Ken Walibora's Ndoto ya Amerika [The American Dream]
AU - Mwangi, Evan
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2011 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2010/5
Y1 - 2010/5
N2 - This paper reads Ken Walibora's Kiswahili children's book Ndoto ya Amerika [The American Dream] as a critical intervention in the politics of the imagination in Kenya. I argue that although the story is radical in its subtle criticism of the West, its main focus is the disillusionment with the post-independence dispensation in Africa. By tracking the story's imaginative engagements with the Kiswahili language, the African American diaspora, and the disciplinary apparatus of the postcolonial Kenyan state, I find that Walibora promotes rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for literary and political development. Despite its artistic innovativeness in addressing the problems that African nations face, Ndoto ya Amerika has received little critical attention. It behoves the postcolonial critic to consider popular and children's texts in indigenous languages of the Global South, as texts like Ndoto ya Amerika offer an energetic critique of universalized notions of cosmopolitanism while proposing alternative cosmopolitan practices. I read Ndoto ya Amerika as undermining dominant notions of cosmopolitanism which, in their triumphalist perception of globalization, privilege the affluent postcolonial subject based in the West.
AB - This paper reads Ken Walibora's Kiswahili children's book Ndoto ya Amerika [The American Dream] as a critical intervention in the politics of the imagination in Kenya. I argue that although the story is radical in its subtle criticism of the West, its main focus is the disillusionment with the post-independence dispensation in Africa. By tracking the story's imaginative engagements with the Kiswahili language, the African American diaspora, and the disciplinary apparatus of the postcolonial Kenyan state, I find that Walibora promotes rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for literary and political development. Despite its artistic innovativeness in addressing the problems that African nations face, Ndoto ya Amerika has received little critical attention. It behoves the postcolonial critic to consider popular and children's texts in indigenous languages of the Global South, as texts like Ndoto ya Amerika offer an energetic critique of universalized notions of cosmopolitanism while proposing alternative cosmopolitan practices. I read Ndoto ya Amerika as undermining dominant notions of cosmopolitanism which, in their triumphalist perception of globalization, privilege the affluent postcolonial subject based in the West.
KW - African cosmopolitanism
KW - African diaspora in America
KW - Ken Walibora
KW - Kiswahili
KW - children's literature
KW - crime
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U2 - 10.1080/17449851003706651
DO - 10.1080/17449851003706651
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79957891312
VL - 46
SP - 125
EP - 137
JO - World Literature Written in English
JF - World Literature Written in English
SN - 1744-9855
IS - 2
ER -