Literature, history, and postcolonial cultural identity in Africa and the Balkans: The search for a usable past in Farah, Ngugi, Krleza, and Andric

This study examines the role of literature and history in the construction of postcolonial cultural identities in two African and two European societies. I examine in detail the works of one writer from each of these societies. Nuruddin Farah is a Somali writer who explores his society's Italian and British colonial background. Ngugi wa Thiong'o writes about Kenya and its British colonial heritage. My other two writers come from Croatia and Bosnia, two European countries that have much in common with the postcolonial nations of Africa. Miroslav Krleza is a well-known writer from Croatia (an ex-Austro-Hungarian domain) and Ivo Andric, the Nobel-prize winner of 1961, is from Bosnia (a former part of both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires). All four of these writers are intensely focused (though often in significantly different ways) on the histories of their societies, seeking to recover material from the past that can contribute to the development of viable cultural identities in the present.; I investigate the ways each writer explores his country's history of resistance to colonial/imperial power. Further, I examine the use of this history by each writer to counter existing subaltern colonial identities imposed by the traditions of colonialist historiography. These four writers employ a number of different strategies in their work and draw upon traditions that offer a variety of alternatives to the mainstream tradition of European bourgeois aesthetics. In all four cases these techniques are derived from sources that include indigenous oral traditions, European modernism, and European leftist literature.; I pay particular attention to the ideological positions that the writers themselves occupy and to the ways these positions are reflected in their writing. Andric and Farah write from essentially bourgeois ideological standpoints and therefore reflect the strivings of the emergent (decadent, per Fanon) bourgeoisie of their societies, while Krleza and Ngugi directly oppose bourgeois ideology and espouse Marxist ideas as a potential source of positive energies for their literary projects.