The Biopolitics of Migration: Critical Becomings in the Contemporary African Novel

Is it possible to be both a migrant and a human? Or, more cynically: is it possible for a migrant to become human? What role does literature have in mediating, contesting, or representing this relationship? Taking up questions that surround the categories of ‘the human’ and ‘the migrant’, this thesis bridges political theology and postcolonial studies in order to analyse and critique the ways in which contemporary discourses of Western modernity and biopolitics contribute to the production, and negation, of those categories. I argue that contemporary African literature is an especially productive site through which to explore this dialectic, because of Africa's long entangled history with the West; from the trans-Atlantic slave-trade through to neo-colonialism. Classical theories of biopolitics from Foucault, Agamben and Esposito which address the production of subjects and subjectivities formed through power exclude this history, thus excluding this racialised ‘other’ from those discursive productions of humanity. It is these discourses which we have inherited–by virtue of Western hegemony’s imposition of a system of nation-states – that produce a discordance between ‘the migrant’ and ‘the human’. Because the modern nation-state prescribes humanity on the basis of citizenship, this discordance thus translates into a legal split between the natural human (zoe) and the rights-bearing person (bios). The migrant is thus perennially caught in between the two. I build on Mbembe’s work – who introduces the racial element to biopolitics – in order to argue that inherent to those hegemonic Western philosophies is both an epistemic and ontological lacuna with regards to African articulations of personhood and subjectivity. African literature thus operates from within this lacuna, to inaugurate alternative ways of being human, a process which I term critical-becoming. To become critical is to instantiate a form of life which occupies two valencies: it is both the process by which one leads a critical life, but it is also the process by which one develops a criticality. This enables a dynamic, non-linear ‘becoming’, as opposed to the prescribed development of a linear ‘being’. Authors such as Chris Abani, Noviolet Bulawayo and Brian Chikwava each craft novels which take up this dialectic, both thematically as well as formally. This thesis will look at two Nigerian novels (GraceLand and Becoming Abigail) and two Zimbabwean novels (We Need New Names and Harare North) and will be structured thematically, according to the diegetic spaces of the characters, as well as formally, in order to map a trajectory of migration. Because literature is capable of holding together those entangled temporal realities, it is also able to place the romantic multiculturalism of 1980s postcolonial theory in tension with the bleak reality of our secular, biopolitical moment, while still opening up alternative cosmologies of the future.