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Wealth in Fiction: Capitalism, Animism, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Trilogy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2018
Abstract
This article proposes the concept of noncapitalist wealth as a line of inquiry into the relations among capitalism, animism, and literary production. I begin by discussing the methodological implications of Harry Garuba’s influential essay on “animist materialism” and suggest that Garuba’s operating theory of capital means that his method ultimately leads to a mode of reading that understands animism as bearing primarily upon representation rather than on literary production. The result is a mode of reading that lacks sensitivity to the implications of the influence of specific animisms on individual texts. Eschewing an encompassing theory of animism’s relation to literary production, I propose the concept of noncapitalist wealth, derived in part from Karl Marx and anthropologists such as Jane I. Guyer, as a potential avenue of inquiry within the debate around literary animisms. I offer a reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy (1990–1998) to demonstrate the ways in which an operating concept of wealth, combined with a sensitivity to contemporary forms of capitalism, can help to reveal the political dimension of some literary texts.
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- Articles
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 318 - 337
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- © Cambridge University Press 2018
References
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58 Ibid., 446.
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61 Ibid., 280.
62 Ibid., 281.
63 Ibid., 277–78.
64 Ibid., 281.
65 Okri, Infinite Riches, 83.
66 Okri, Songs of Enchantment, 279, 280.
67 Ibid., 280.
68 I distinguish the “wealth in people” that I am highlighting from the “vernacular humanism” that Kim Sasser identifies in The Famished Road. Although Sasser correctly identifies elements of an alternative politics, to understand these elements as part of a humanist philosophy on Okri’s part is to minimize their importance vis-à-vis capitalism and to miss their nonhuman potential. See Sasser, Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism, 71–106.
69 Okri, Infinite Riches, 394
70 Quoted in Fulford, “Ben Okri, the Aesthetic, and the Problem with Theory,” 233.