
Contents
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Simultaneous Modes of Reality in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Simultaneous Modes of Reality in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
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Hegemonic Organisations and Creative Redistributions of the Sensible Hegemonic Organisations and Creative Redistributions of the Sensible
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The Novel’s ‘Weak Utopia’ as a Radical De-organisation of the Sensible The Novel’s ‘Weak Utopia’ as a Radical De-organisation of the Sensible
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Notes Notes
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References References
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3 Aisthetic Realities in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: A Matter-Oriented Reading of Postcolonial Literature
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Published:December 2020
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Abstract
Merging various aspects of postanthropocentric theory with a bodily/sensuous reading of literature, this chapter discovers an expansion of epistemological and ontological dimensions in a close analysis of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Human immersion in and entanglements with more-than-human-realities emerge and combine with the novel’s postcolonial criticism of corruption and greed, legacies of imperialist ideology, capitalism, waste and inequality on a local and global scale. The frame of reading that the article develops shows how the world in Armah’s novel unfolds as sensuous appearances of matter and events through which the consciousness of the central character gets to shift between subjective, collective, depersonalized and even de-anthropocentisised perceptions of reality. In the latter mode, the force of life itself materialises as an impersonal agent of otherness that profoundly redistributes habitual organisations of the sensible. The novel thus discloses and enacts the presence of a power other than (yet entwined with) the power of dominant sociocultural, political and economic value-investments, which ultimately keeps open a potential for shaping human reality and futuority in ways that are different from the impoverished and destructive human-human and human-nonhuman relationships that the novel criticises.
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