Vernacular Critique, Deleuzo-Guattarian Theory and Cultural Historicism in West African and Southern African Literatures

In this thesis I use concepts from Deleuzo-Guattarian theory, combined with a vernacular theoretical understanding, to perform cultural historicist readings of texts that lack clear contextual referents, as I demonstrate with an extended close reading of Amos Tutuola’s problematic classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard; I then demonstrate the approach’s versatility by using it to read a very different text, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.
Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard draws on vernacular theories of the bush common across West Africa, in which the bush is a discursive space for exploring personal and social traumas. Tutuola’s Bush of Ghosts, I argue, engages with the Yoruba Wars, the slave trade, and colonial capitalist development of Nigeria to the mid-twentieth century. I demonstrate not only how Tutuola uses ghosts as critical historical tools, but how he develops a peculiarly open textual space which serves as an alternative and a challenge to developmental trends.
From history enacted across ghostly landscape I move to politics as a highly personal nightmare in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. From communal vernacular theoretical traditions, I move to Head’s ‘schizophrenic’ vernacular theories. I argue that this text speaks to contexts far beyond Head’s personal experience of Apartheid. I read it as a schizohistory of Botswana’s developmental and political history, and as a lament of authoritarian tendencies across Africa a decade after independence. Head combines politics with mysticism, drawing on Hinduism to forge a politics of interconnectedness.
Texts like Tutuola’s and Head’s become far more accessible through historicist readings, and these readings become possible once we are equipped with a theoretical vocabulary flexible enough to translate across a wide variety of discursive spheres. The approach I demonstrate encourages and facilitates a more interdisciplinary and contextually-grounded approach to African literature, clarifying formerly obscure texts.