Postmodern Reading of Contemporary East African Fiction: Modernist Dream and the Demise of Culture

This book likens writers’ incessant focus on racism, negative ethnicity, patriarchy and social stratification in societies to a naïve physician who prescribes analgesics to treat symptoms while the underlying cause of the disease seethes in the blood. In the same way, persons who consistently blame their reckless conduct and shabbiness miss the point if they do not transform the actual cause of the problem: the mind. While most literary scholars problematise gender disparities, racial and political othering, oppression, environment degradation, education matters, poor parenting and governance, they tend to disregard the root cause: modernism. This book finds a gap in this grey area to address the authentic cause of the symptoms that most literary writers and scholars treat. Pertinent modernist tenets such as bureaucracy, the nation state, systematisation and rationality, and dualism are at the heart of racism, corruption and other aforementioned symptoms. It is the contention of this study that postmodernism offers a comprehensive understanding of modernism to mitigate its effects on society.

Andrew Nyongesa is currently a lecturer at Murang’a University of Technology (Kenya) and a writer of fiction. Some of his published works are The Endless Battle (2016), The Water Cycle (2018), Many in One and Other Stories (2019), The Armageddon and Other Stories (2020) and Say my Name and Other Stories from Home and Away (2021) all of which are based on postcolonialism and eco-criticism. His scholarly works include Cultural Fixity and Hybridity: Strategies of Resistance in Safi Abdi’s Fiction, ’Conversation with ＂other＂ Style and Pathology in Selected African Novels’ by Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies, ’Humanity and Mother Nature: Ecological Reading of Ole Kulet’s Blossoms of the Savannah’ by Kenya Studies Review and ’Wagar and Motley ＂Archaic＂ Vestiges: A Postmodernist Reading of Contemporary Somalia Fiction’ by Journal of Literary Studies. His latest publication is ’The Centre and Pathology: Postmodernist Reading of Madness in the Oppressor in Contemporary Fiction’ by Cogent Arts and Humanities. His research interests are postcolonialism, postmodernism, speculative fiction, psychological criticism or stream of consciousness literature, Black aesthetics and eco-criticism. His PhD dissertation in the stream of consciousness literatures demonstrates his enthusiasm in mental health issues.