Plurality in Question: Zimbabwe and the Agonistic African Novel

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

This essay argues for a structuralist approach to reading the recurrence of formal, geographic, and epistemological schisms in the Zimbabwean novel from the 1970s through today. The essay makes this claim within a wider context of plurality's fetishization in African literary studies and postcolonial theory. Whereas the postcolonial-cum-global field tends to prioritize categorical expansiveness and dissolution in African writing, equating structural and conceptual more-than-oneness with pluralism of a clearly political expression, “Plurality in Question” suggests that a robust pluralist practice in fact demands categorical delineation and opposition. In this way, Zimbabwean writers' frequent reliance on binary oppositions becomes the starting point for theorizing an argumentative novel form, which responds to but may not directly reflect the antipluralist commitments of lived imperial and/or nationalist politics. In the context of African literature specifically, the essay also offers a new through-line connecting key liberation-era fiction (e.g., Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera) with some of its current transnational successor texts (e.g., NoViolet Bulawayo, Christopher Mlalazi).

Plurality in Question: Zimbabwe and the Agonistic African Novel JEANNE-MARIE JACKSON Postcolonialism and the field that succeeds it—known variously in English departments as world, global, and transnational literature—struggle with the matter of categories. Globalist scholars often aim to bypass definition altogether: we tend toward dismantling the containers used to delimit cultures and identities, instead emphasizing nonreductive liminalities and flows. As Caroline Levine suggests in her recent book Forms, this interest in multiplicity and multivalence has led the way, in the broader critical profession, to valuing reading that seeks “places where the binary breaks down or dissolves, generating possibilities that turn the form into something more ambiguous and ill-defined—formless” (9). Categorical plurality and disbanding has no doubt been vital to the contemporary humanities, given the punishing rigidities from and against which postcolonialism emerged. At least since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, scholars of writing from the global South have pushed literary studies writ large to move past epistemologically prescriptive texts and methods. Structuralist narrative techniques, in this context, present as an insidious politics: abstract binaries like center and periphery or foreign and native are read as latent expressions of particular imperial and/or nationalist ideologies that police social distinctions.1 In this way, reading for an abstract kind of literary multiplicity—the epistemological and narratological endorsement of the fluid many over the demarcated one—has in many ways come to signify the progressive cosmopolitan bona fides of literary critics. This essay intends the term plurality, then (rather than pluralism in a clearly political sense), to mark the ongoing effacement of the novel’s mediated status by a direct isomorphism of literary form and social history. African literature in particular is usually read through one of two polemical lenses that speak to the eager conflation of narrative technique and ideological persuasion: either antiessentialism, of the sort suggested above, or a countervailing assertion of collective identity. The former, more common approach holds that binaristic forms endorse social and identitarian foreclosure (who is “civilized” and who is not; who is “African 1 Literary scholars often motivate their suspicion of a particular narrative structure or device based on its correspondence with historical policies and events. Mahmoud Mamdani’s Define and Rule, for example, details the attempt to master a “more intimate and local understanding” of colonized cultures, which Mamdani ascribes to the nineteenth-century British jurist and indirect rule architect Henry Maine, through a legal binary that aims to “closet the native in a separate conceptual world, shut off from the world of the settler by a binary: progressive [settler] and stationary [native] societies” (13). It is not hard to make the leap from Mamdani’s formulation here to the methodological corollary of structuralism in its most odious typification, as the “systematic inventories of elements and their possibilities of combination” (Culler 22) that J. Hillis Miller once attributed to “Socratic critics . . . lulled by the promise of a rational ordering of literary study” (335). Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-6846192 Ó 2018 by Novel, Inc. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 340 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 enough”), whereas representing transcategorical “plurality” signals a commitment to social and political inclusion. For work on African novels to rightly transcend disciplinary silos, though, we need a more sophisticated means of asking not just what the novel is but what it does: what analytic methods do key texts structurally perform or facilitate, beyond their ostensible contexts of production? As one possible answer, I will argue here for the African novel that argues. As Levine entreats us to be bolder in moving beyond a rote preference for categorical suspension—to try, now, to “analyze the major work that forms do in our world” (9)—I want to suggest that categories are essential to narrative structures of debate, above and beyond the particular categories such structures may seem to entrench. This breaks sharply with the mantle of critique by which Africanist literary work most often proceeds in the negative, so to speak, by unpeeling so many onion layers of context to reveal an ideological core. Instead, I ask how an African novelistic tradition might technically exceed its individual texts’ most obvious themes, permitting a more nuanced response to African narrative structures and their social significance.2 To this end, this essay presents the Zimbabwean novel as an aggregate case study that challenges the default and often imprecise critical virtue of plurality, or more-than-oneness. This gesture may at first seem counterprogressive: Zimbabwe is widely associated with the virulent nationalism of Robert Mugabe, the country’s leader from 1980 to 2017. Humanist critics are thus wont to interpret categorical oppositions in Zimbabwean writing—for example, rural and urban, one nation versus another, or languages that just will not mix—as symptoms of the social and ideological rigidity characteristic of an autocratic state. It is no doubt true that some Zimbabwean writers have nationalist or nativist inclinations, urging international scholars of the region toward a handful of lyrical and “liminal” stylists like Yvonne Vera and Chenjerai Hove (also both well known as critics of the Mugabe regime). Departing from plurality as a post-categorical ideal, however, in favor of theorizing narrative models that rely on categories to argue, shows that dualistic structures do more than enforce social divisions. Key Zimbabwean works are agonistic in form, subjecting even plurality itself to contestation and debate. It is a tradition that privileges categorical conflict over categorical dissolution, thereby relativizing plurality to maintain sharper structures of disagreement. This, in turn, may offer an unlikely space for social pluralism to thrive: the agonistic novel keeps the Zimbabwean fight alive, in structural rather than obviously ideological terms. 2 The most efficient way to describe Africanist scholars’ long-standing propensity for the critique of, rather than the establishment of, genres, traditions, and categories of literary analysis can be found in some outstanding previous examples of its opposite, which is to say the critique of critique. Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial, which he opens by decrying postcolonial theory’s “own apparent resistance to distinction and classification” in its promulgation as a “general theory of the non-generalisable as such” (xi), is probably the most incisive work in this vein. More recently, the members of the Warwick Research Collective have published Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Deckard et al.), which argues for a forceful definition of world literature as a system, against the obfuscatory “structural” commitments of structuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction that the authors take to undergird the adjacent fields of postcolonial and global literature. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON * * PLURALITY IN QUESTION 341 * I would like to begin with a brief Zimbabwean example before turning to a broad theoretical exposition. In his 2002 essay collection Palaver Finish, the self-exiled (and recently deceased) Zimbabwean writer Hove declares that the “beautiful dreamers” of Zimbabwe have “woken up to the ugliness of nightmare” (8). And yet one would be hard-pressed to identify the corollary dream space of the present. “Teachers, too,” Hove bemoans, “have to flee the anger of the so-called [Zimbabwean Liberation] war veterans and politicians to find work in foreign cities where the education of children means providing them with the values of human dignity and the sanctity of life” (7). While few readers are likely to quibble with such values, Hove’s occlusion of a specific destination here is telling. To mention the actual place to which the vast majority of Zimbabweans “flee”—that is, South Africa, among the most heralded democratic success stories of the postcolonial era—would invite a particularized account of democracy’s own precarity.3 As a result, Hove’s invocation of a more open, dignified space is staked to geographic and conceptual vagueness. He regrets Zimbabweans’ need to escape the “bad” without articulating a persuasive vision of the “good.” Hove makes a pointed criticism of the Zimbabwean state by situating its failings in an imprecise transnational frame, thereby crystallizing a brand of critical elision that is especially prevalent in Africanist literary scholarship: we are able to pick out the absence of complexity, but we have difficulty offering systematic, complex readings that get beyond a negative critique. The drawbacks of a postrationalist stance “against categories” in favor of more immediate, singular encounters with texts have been amply theorized in the literary field’s mainstream, juxtaposing a Deleuzian plurality of amorphous design with something more like a Habermasian pluralist public of mutually engaged positions.4 Walter Benn Michaels’s The 3 There has been a spate of books in political science and adjacent fields over the last ten to fifteen years debating the terms on which South Africa should or should not be considered a regional economic and democratic success story. Among them, see Patrick Bond’s controversial Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Michael H. Allen’s Globalization, Negotiation, and the Failure of Transformation in South Africa, and Lawrence Hamilton’s Are South Africans Free? The Johannesburg-based cultural theorist Achille Mbembe does not go so far as to suggest that South Africa is or is likely to become a failed state, but he noted recently in the country’s major newspaper, the Mail and Guardian, that it now falls prey to “the mixture of clientelism, nepotism and prebendalism so prevalent in the immediate aftermath of African decolonisation.” 4 This essay makes no contribution to the postcolonial literature on Deleuze and Guattari, but the following quote on the construction of the unconscious from A Thousand Plateaus is helpful in both suggesting and obscuring the implications of their work for thinking about literary form’s relation to political paradigms: The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency . . . The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a mediation. (12) Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 342 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 Shape of the Signifier and Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now are two of the best-known examples. Anderson, appositely, introduces her book by resisting “the underdeveloped and often incoherent evaluative stance of contemporary theory, its inability to clearly avow the norms and values underlying its own critical programs” (1). Benn Michaels, for his part, decries the “invention of racial identity and then of its transformation both into the pluralized form of cultural identity and into the privileging of the subject position as such” (12). But this strain of critical thought—what we might summarize as arguing for argument as a key literary domain instead of just identifying literature with subjectivity or experience—has failed to find real traction in the postcolonial arena. In the philosopher Maria Baghramian’s account, this widespread academic “preoccupation with ideas of pluralism, relativism, and multiplicity of perspectives” (44) can also be explained through the successive disciplinary afterlives of Kant’s scheme-content dualism (i.e., the distinction between experience itself and the conceptual models we use to organize and make sense of experience). As Baghramian suggests, it is among the most crucial foundations of the pluralist episteme, because Kant permitted new variability in interpreting a reality that nonetheless maintained the status of true or universal. And yet scheme-content dualism, over the decades in which postcolonial and poststructuralist theory found its footing, was criticized for being insufficiently accountable to a plurality of experience, on account of its still being “motivated by . . . the suspect notion of a priori truth” (49). Baghramian, in good pragmatist fashion, thus indicates an irresoluble contradiction: scheme-content duality allows both for the existence of “reality” as such and for its conflicting organizations. In this reading, distinguishing between the real and our conceptions of the real thereby traps critics in a conceptual no-man’s-land between the two poles of relativism and universality. Individualized perceptions, instead of being legitimized, are reduced to the status of mere “intermediaries between us and the world” (54), the identifying marks of what Donald Davidson calls a “featureless self” free of “distortion of the real” and “without categories and concepts” (7). In this sense, an antiessentialist literary paradigm can be celebrated for creating an archive of particularities, valuable for its defiance of extrapolation into a larger, often violent organizing framework.5 To again quote Davidson in “On the 5 Francoise Lionnet’s 2012 address to the American Comparative Literature Association, “Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison: From Fiction to Archive in the Colonial Indian Ocean,” is a useful example. In it, Lionnet aims mainly to “put into crisis” (448) earlier epistemologies and uses an Amitav Ghosh novel involving Mauritius (Sea of Poppies) to mount “a harsh critique of the historiographic practices that tend to solidify rigid categories of academic thought, since these can then lead to artificial distinctions that justify violence and divisions” (449). South Africa, especially, has also been a key site for the development of the timely Indian Ocean studies subfield. The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, established at Wits University in Johannesburg in 2007, has played a prominent role in bringing the field to interdisciplinary prominence, with literary studies among its chief areas of focus. Indian Ocean scholars’ unifying aims are unassailable: they seek to escape the limitations of Anglo-American cultural history and counterhistory that a focus on either Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 343 Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” we might see current historicist and materialist approaches to global Southern writing as having moved usefully away from a conceptual scheme that organizes, systematizes, or divides up objects— what Davidson calls “posits” (16)—and toward the paradoxical task of accounting for, or facing, the “tribunal of experience” (14). The challenge for literary scholars with formal investments, though, who are eager to journey down this nonessentialist path, is that narrative is, fundamentally, an intermediary between us and the world. While an intention to find “ways in which we can be directly in touch with the world, without any further need for incorrigible or otherwise privileged and foundational epistemic items” (Baghramian 55), might make sense as a philosophical vision, it is a misconceived frame for a literary hermeneutics. And yet the rejection of scheme/content duality—concomitant with much wishful thinking about narrative functionality’s social power—remains congenial to postcolonial and more recent humanistic investments in a generalized antibinarism. The persistent imperative of dismantling imperialist and/or nationalist epistemologies, for that matter, has also been manifest in global literature itself, as an impulse to foreground the ever-shifting “flows” behind historical and subjective construction. In this sense, many global writers, like the global critics who champion them, seek a contemporary version of what the nineteenth-century Russian novel scholar Irina Paperno once called “a model that essentially involves a lack of modeling” (9). The critical canonization of two broad schools of anglophone writing that use novels to model a nonrestrictive global Southern humanism makes the appeal of apparent nonmediation especially clear. The first, typified by the archival anglophone Indian writer Amitav Ghosh in his novels of vast cartographic spread (particularly Sea of Poppies from 2008, the start of an epic trilogy about the opium trade), focuses on previously underrepresented transnational constellations to shed light on the historical vicissitudes of multidirectional commerce: Ghosh’s novels are famously encyclopedic, replete with data like shipping terminology, multilingual period vernacular, and dozens of characters spread across social classes. To quote the Indian Ocean scholar Isabel Hofmeyr in a 2012 essay subtitled “The Indian Ocean as Method,” anachronistic categories like “domination and resistance” or “colonizer and colonized” have given way here to a copiously detailed transnational historicism. A creole space like the Indian Ocean “requires us to take a much longer perspective, which necessarily complicates any simple binaries” (589), including the nationalist counterassertions of decolonization. It is fitting, then, that virtually every major scholar of Indian Ocean the Atlantic or Pacific worlds tends to imply. In its place, they favor an emphasis on cosmopolitanism and circulation in “an area whose boundaries are both moveable and porous” (Moorthy and Jamal 4), aware of both the “dangers of Occidentalism and the inversion of binaries” (6). Interestingly, the ocean is also Davidson’s figure of choice for discussing the difficulty of comparing conceptual or categorical schemes with experiential or sensory ones. “Someone who sets out to organize a closet arranges the things in it,” he writes. “If you are told not to organize the shoes and shirts, but the closet itself, you would be bewildered. How would you organize the Pacific Ocean? Straighten out its shores, perhaps, or relocate its islands, or destroy its fish” (14). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 344 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 studies, including Hofmeyr, Gaurav Desai, and Francoise Lionnet, takes Ghosh’s novels as among the primary sources—and sometimes the only source—in their South-South literary archive.6 The other most visible transnational conjuncture of postcategorical novels and postcategorical criticism—captured ideally in the title of the essay “To Hear the Variety of Discourses” (2011) by the acclaimed South African “coloured” writer Zoë Wicomb—strives to represent representational flux on a more limited, subjective scale. In Wicomb’s case, this often takes the form of a mixed-race female character in the hybridistic, littoral city of Cape Town.7 This latter trend, in sum, valorizes subjective and cultural nonfixity by charting their interplay with equally fluid geographies, again with special focus on the Indian Ocean region through South Africa’s Western Cape. Geographic spread is the hallmark strategy of most of the highest-profile recent African literary works, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), with its many-pronged world aviation network and kaleidoscopic view of diasporic sensibilities; Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), as it charts convergences between African and diasporic families and institutions; and Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011), built of porous, atemporal, and synesthetic moments of self-formation. These works’ many merits aside, they seem to capture what Benn Michaels describes as “the disarticulation of difference from disagreement” (30), a movement away from ideological positions in favor of a “softer” cultural and subjective orientation. Studies of the African novel, from close readings to critical movements like Afropolitanism and oceanic studies, prioritize questions of who one is and where one is rather than what one endorses or stands for beyond plurality itself. To quote again from The Shape of the Signifier, the field serves as the foremost critical evidence of “a movement from the universalist logic of conflict as difference of opinion to the posthistoricist logic of conflict as difference in subject position” (33). In the instance of what I will shorthand here as the Ghosh and Wicomb variants of narrative nonfixity, international literary and academic gatekeepers have been attracted to a cosmopolitan disposition that has complicated the reception of even the most heralded Zimbabwean writers. This is because Zimbabwean novels tend to deploy a lot of dichotomous pairs, a technique that—without a scheme/content distinction to draw our attention to the structural effect rather than the ontology of the text (or what processes its organizing principles foster, not simply what politics they may signal)—may easily be read as discontinuous or reductive. NoViolet Bulawayo’s Booker Prize–shortlisted We Need New Names (2013), for example, has come under fire for its rigid contrast between Bulawayo, in southern Zimbabwe, and Detroit (the main character Darling is at one point able to Skype with friends 6 See also Gaurav Desai’s 2013 book Commerce with the Universe, winner of the 2014 Rene Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, and, again, Lionnet’s 2012 lecture “Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison.” 7 In Wicomb’s 2006 novel Playing in the Light, for example, a Cape Town woman who is unaware of her mixed-race heritage must navigate relations with her first black employee. In October (2014), the main character struggles to negotiate between fraught family and social and racial relations in South Africa and those of her diasporic home of Scotland. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 345 from home, but the connection is weak in all senses). In a thoughtful piece for the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Culture, the Zimbabwe-raised literary scholar Ashleigh Harris mentions “the odd structural break in the text between the sections set in Zimbabwe and those set in the US,” which makes the book read like “two stories written for creative writing class: the first driven by the content demands of ‘writing what you know’ as the member of the group bringing the high cultural pluralism into the group,” and the second “as the cinch in the deal of making this an American fiction.” The most visible of the critical reviews of We Need New Names, though, was Nigerian novelist Helon Habila’s from The Guardian. In a broader criticism of what is often called the “Caine Prize aesthetic” of CNN-ready depictions of African suffering for Western audiences, he notes Bulawayo’s “rather free-ranging, episodic plot structure,” in which “the narrator is whisked away to America.” Harris and Habila have a point: Bulawayo’s novel, in its juxtaposition of Zimbabwean poverty, AIDS, and political violence with relatively secure but stultifying urban middle-class American life, depicts two very different settings. It can therefore easily be read as symptomatic of the “selling” of the African continent by a globalized publishing industry. In Habila’s critique, Bulawayo shows why one might want to “escape” Zimbabwe for the United States; Harris then reads her as leveraging this escape to offer gentler but still shallow criticisms of America as well. Their shared concern is that the book’s parts do not add up to a realistic whole, falling back instead on an exaggerated locational disconnection that grapples with globality at the level of trope, not structure. To summarize the critical climate surrounding African writing, then, global-pluralist scholars are urged to increase the visible range of subjective and historical positions by privileging texts that themselves foreground connectivity. The above critiques of We Need New Names—in which the narrator pronounces, “It’s hard to explain, this feeling; it’s like there’s two of me” (212)—therefore suggest that Bulawayo fails to bridge multiple geographic perspectives and thus is locked within a Western structural inheritance of binary opposition. But this premium on connection is itself deeply flawed; We Need New Names, in narrative rather than theoretical practice, is set up to argue for the value of opposition in adjudicating the merits of numerous imperfect social and political options. Put differently, the novel presents argument as what Levine might call an “affordance” of dichotomous pairs, a term she adopts “to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs.” Instead of focusing on “what forms do”—which, in Bulawayo’s case, might be to reflect or entrench politically regressive categorical divisions—Levine suggests asking “what potentialities lie latent . . . in aesthetic and social arrangements” (6–7). To be sure, a book that depicts life in Zimbabwe in formal disconnection from life in Detroit could be read as having failed to internalize globalized modernity. But it might also be read as a strategic contrast between two contexts—one (America) a liberal-pluralist democracy and one (Zimbabwe) for the most part not—that is stark enough to act as an alternative to either utopic plurality or nationalist binaries in imagining Zimbabwe.8 If one begins from the premise that categorical ambiguity 8 I have no interest in mounting a political argument as regards Zimbabwe; there are people who are much better equipped to do so. For readers who are unfamiliar with the country’s history, however, it was long marked internationally as one of the world’s least pluralistic political spaces, Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 346 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 is of more social value than sharp debate about what categories should and do comprise, it is, admittedly, difficult to imagine how opposition might be read as structurally productive rather than just politically useful. And intolerance of ambiguity has, understandably, become the defining anxiety of Zimbabwean humanist scholarship in the years following national independence in 1980: Mugabe’s thirtyseven-year reign over what many critics see as an autocratic state is a difficult thing to peer beyond. As the novelist and vocal regime critic Stanley Nyamfukudza puts it in his 2005 lecture “To Skin a Skunk: Some Observations on Zimbabwe’s Intellectual Development,” Zimbabwean discourse now “operates by way of raising a selection of emotive ideas to the status of sacred cows; ideas of national unity, of sovereignty, of the sacrifices of liberation, and of patriotism and racial solidarity” (16). Likewise, Ranka Primorac, in her book The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe, invokes Achille Mbembe to articulate her experiences with Zimbabwe’s restrictive academic culture. “Mbembe singles out two intersecting currents of thought,” she writes, “which have locked African thinking about identity and freedom into oppositional mode” (8). These currents are what Mbembe calls “Afroradicalism and nativism,” which impede the reinvention of a “being-together situation” (8). Scholarship on Zimbabwe, in Primorac’s account, has a clear, epistemologically pluralizing mission: it can help restore literature to the status of “complex and ambivalent,” to lift a description from her analysis of the internationally acclaimed novelist Vera (168). It is not, however, an endorsement of Mugabe’s government to propose a more pointed conceptual apparatus for addressing the novel’s relation to pluralism, growing out of a thicker conception of plurality as it attempts to cut across literary and political discourses. This is where a return to philosophy and political theory is helpful for refining a literary method that prioritizes argument. To be clear, I am invested neither in using Zimbabwean literature to amend pluralist theory, whose authors are not literary scholars, nor in merely “applying” Western pluralist theory to Zimbabwean novels. I aim, rather, to put pluralist theory that relies heavily on figuration into conversation with literary studies’ postcategorical strain under the influence of its postcolonial and/or global subfields. It goes without saying that much of this secondary material has originated from the American context, given its unusually acute preoccupation with the gap resulting from pluralism as a democratic ideal versus as an unevenly fulfilled reality.9 This no doubt indicates a commitment on particularly in comparison with the far more visible South Africa (whose post-apartheid democratic credentials, nonetheless, have been substantially tarnished by the Zuma presidency that began in 2009). Harare has been governed by ZANU-PF through often violent repression of minority populations (most notably of Ndebele civilians in the Gukurahundi attacks of the mid1980s); voter rights; and impoverished communities (through Operation Murambatsvina, or “Drive Out the Rubbish,” and, some would say, more recent efforts to rid the capital city of its swelling street-vendor population). The government has often been criticized abroad for its forced distribution of arable land from white “settler” families to black war veterans of the Second Chimurenga liberation war, 1966–79. 9 It need hardly be said that pluralism has been a topic of primary concern in scholarship on the American novel. See, as one recent example, Julianne Newmark’s The Pluralist Imagination: From Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 347 my part to thinking about African national traditions in relation to broader global theoretical contexts. It is also, however, simply a matter of where and by whom plurality as such—which is to say, as a representational ideal—has been most thoroughly developed. The models of plurality above, which discuss Africa and Zimbabwe in particular, work jointly with more generalized work on the topic to indicate where the design by which pluralism is imagined becomes amorphous, untenable, and thus structurally ill-suited to argument regardless of where it occurs. With this syncretic critical approach in mind, perhaps nowhere has the difference between plurality as an unscaled ideal and pluralism as a scalable structural practice been as lucidly articulated as in Nicholas Rescher’s Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus, which lays out competing pluralisms of incommensurable shape. Right from the start, Rescher denaturalizes the assumption that plurality as such (the sort of “paradigmatic” plurality, I would suggest, that is at stake in most literary projects) is necessarily synonymous with the social good. Whereas in “much of the [philosophical] tradition consensus was viewed not just as something to be desired,” he writes, “but as something whose eventual actualization is effectively assured by some principle” (e.g., rational principles, rational processes, or universal truth), “many present-day writers invest social consensus not with confidence, but with hope” (1). In response, “diversity” as a socially and institutionally manifest plurality is now often upheld as the highest order Western value. This is a paradigmatic change perhaps still best captured by Isaiah Berlin in “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will”: “No one today is surprised by the assumption that variety is, in general, preferable to uniformity,” he remarks. “Yet this has not long been so; for the notion that One is good, Many—diversity—is bad, since the truth is one, and only error is multiple is far older” (219–20). For Rescher, writing amid the identity politics of the 1990s (a moment in many ways resonant with our own), a policy of diversity without further specification by default privileges consensus over argument in how plurality, again, is figured or given discernible shape; it amounts to a question like, can’t we all just get along? Instead, Rescher insists that ideologically well-intended plurality must rise to the challenge of a more proactive pluralism. He continues, “[Writers now] look upon interpersonal agreement as a substitute for the assured verities of an earlier era in whose realization they have lost faith” (1). But such mutual toleration is easily ruffled by contact with others’ differing, deeper convictions. A structurally tenable pluralism, on the other hand, must inculcate social forms and practices that “make the world safe for disagreement” (5). Such sweeping assertions nonetheless do not get us very far, and Rescher’s broad pluralist paradigm of disagreement also entails taxonomy of its types, not all of which are created equal. He designates four ways that the general principle of pluralism can become a function of rational dispute and not just a vague commitment. The type most relevant to global literary studies is syncretism, or the “radically open-minded” view that “all the alternatives should be accepted: all those seemingly discordant positions are in fact justified; they must, somehow, be East to West in American Literature, as well as now-classic studies like Walter Benn Michael’s Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 348 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 conjoined and juxtaposed” (80). This idea has particular resonance for how we discuss postcolonial literary traditions, in regard to which plurality is often preordained as an interpretive goal that needs no further justification. The problem, for Rescher, is that multiplicity on its own does not necessarily equate to embarking on “the arduous but productive path of a rational choice which alone prevents our coming away empty-handed from the deliberations at issue” (96). Plurality and sustainable pluralism, that is, do not always add up to the same thing. Championing difference (often, as for Primorac and Mbembe, through inverse condemnation of forms that do not have enough of it) should lead to debate about which structures best facilitate its cultivation. If one is interested in the relationship between narrative and political context, it is what structures do that counts, not what they appear to be. It is useful to note here that even in his apparent endorsement of the “consensus” pluralistic model, Zimbabwe’s Nyamfukudza inadvertently indicates its limitations. “What is important is the existence of an overall consensus about what the major problems are and about what needs to be done to tackle them,” he avers (18). And yet later, in his call for “a serious non-partisan forum for discussion of cultural, social, and even political and other issues,” he seeks a space of “non-partisan argument” (22, 24). The meaningful question here is not whether one thinks pluralism is good but rather how it actually looks and operates; for Nyamfukudza it is contentious and solution-oriented rather than expressed by openness. As concerns syncretism, considering the pluralist episteme’s analogous figuration leads directly from the philosophical to the literary-political domain. What Rescher calls syncretism’s “conjunctionist” program can be grasped as an approach of “conjoining” rather than synthesizing alternative positions: conjunctionism leaves all positions intact but connected to one another, whereas syncretism retains key elements from each to combine them in moving toward a new, better view. Tellingly, in light of this essay’s literary focus, Rescher elects the spatial metaphor of a library’s relation to the books it contains to summarize why conjunctionism is flawed. “The book should be consistent,” he remarks; “it should tell its own internally coherent story. But, just as the library as a whole contains many diverse and discordant books, so reality is a complex of many different and discordant ‘worlds’” (92). In effect, a “pluralist” space on this model only works because it is inanimate; it offers no insight as to how its “members” might interact. More recently, William Connolly, the frequently cited author of Pluralism and Why I Am Not a Secularist, among other, related works, has elaborated his theory of political plurality with recourse to an imaginative structure that is similar to Rescher’s “conjoining.” Drawing on William James, whose intellectual contribution he takes to be that “[p]hilosophy is an art form, not a tight mode of argumentation by which necessary conclusions are drawn” (71), Connolly too is trapped in the gap between pluralist ideals and the argumentative formations required to advance them. His version of pluralism looks something like a chain that extends in all directions or perhaps an infinite Venn diagram: a centered and hierarchal sense of national belonging is replaced with “an image of interdependent minorities of different types connected through multiple lines of affiliation” (62). The quality through which the shared space of the pluralist ethos is maintained, though, is Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 349 described as the “moment of mystery, abyss, rupture, openness, or difference within the faith” and then, later, “an element of mystery, rupture, or difference that evades or resists definitive interpretation” (62). Every time, in fact, that Connolly ventures to describe the payoff of what he calls “deep pluralism,” he reverts to tendentious generalizations about the world. He assumes that there is a “love of difference simmering in most faiths,” for example, and that this constitutes a practice that “must be defended militantly against this or that drive to religio-state Unitarianism” (65; emphasis added). Connolly’s commitments are sincere, but his arguments are betrayed, like those of many postcolonial scholars, by their rejection of the necessarily oppositional premise on which they rest. For Connolly, pluralism counters the threat of a blackor-white religious politics, as for those who study southern Africa a more abstract “plurality” is often meant to counter the threat of an overzealous ZANU-PF or African National Congress. But if this counterspace of complexity is a structural and descriptive “mystery” or void, meaningful more for what it rejects than for what it observes, it recreates the murky dualism of open versus closed. In other words, both Rescher’s library model (which he uses as a negative illustration) and Connolly’s “image of interdependent minorities” wish away the issue of “discordant theses and theories” (Rescher 95) or the logical inconsistencies that practically add up not to an all-encompassing tolerance of different positions but to positional laziness. “Syncretism’s façade of openness and liberality hides from view the awesome cost of taking this sort of position,” Rescher insists. “It purchases the advantage of being liberal and non-judgemental at an unacceptable price: in being over-generous, it is self-defeating” (95). How, then, might we build toward a more robust narrative theory of plurality? A plurality, that is, that is structurally sustainable rather than astructural? For literary critics, the source that comes to mind is no doubt Mikhail Bakhtin and his essay “Discourse in the Novel” in particular. Its argument that has been almost ubiquitously paraphrased is, “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (484). The appeal here for reading the literature of Zimbabwe is clear. In their introduction to the 2005 anthology Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture, for example, Robert Muponde and Primorac identify Vera and Dambudzo Marechera, two of the country’s internationally bestknown writers, as “plurivocal” in contradistinction to the sometimes “xenophobic,” “monologic,” and “nationalist” narratives of the Third Chimurenga (xv), the popular name for ZANU-PF’s fast-track 1980s land redistributions from white farmers to war veterans. This important anthology in the Zimbabwean national field, in other words, is invested primarily in undoing the “neatly symmetrical and curiously familiar” constructs of Zimbabwean “patriotic” postcolonial historiography, in which “time is conceived of as linear . . . and space as sharply divided” between rural and urban, and nation and world (xiv). In a word, Muponde and Primorac seek to restore a more expansive array of voices and shifting viewpoints to Zimbabwean writing. If we return to Bakhtin, though, to test out the pluralizing invitation above with a more developed theory of narrative representation, the fit is in fact rather awkward. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 350 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 Bakhtin also has a penchant to taxonomize, and the levels at which he does this reveal an insistence on both structural opposition and national unity that is often edited out of scholars’ use of his work (albeit a far more flexible version of national unity than was then on offer in Russia). Bakhtin discusses his popular notion of dialogism as well as its partner term, heteroglossia, or raioprfyuf (literally, diverse speech), not just as a general principle of diversity but also at three particular levels of analysis. At baseline, there are words that draw on an array of speech and language types (including the oral-folkloric Russian register of slai); there are utterances that further complicate the origins and meanings of these words; and finally, there is the novel itself that binds “socially alien languages within the boundaries of one and the same national language” (499). Despite his theory of formal diversity, then, in the conviction that “language is heteroglot from top to bottom” (503), Bakhtin does not sacrifice the novel’s overriding, unifying purpose or his interest in identifying “socially significant world views” as opposed to a moral achievement of inclusivity (502). Furthermore, he adheres to a belief that there is a common “movement of the theme through different languages and speech types” (485), meaning that Bakhtinian multiplicity is not mainly about individuated perspectives but is concerned with language’s capacity to variously refract a shared reality. Bakhtin’s capacity to accommodate something like William Connolly’s hyperinclusive pluralism is thus severely limited. More to the point, he postulates the novel as an overridingly oppositional form. At its highest level of generality, it binds together utterances that “[participate] in the ‘unitary languages’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time [partake] of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)” (491). His overall theory is tinged with argument and aggression: “[T]he dialogic nature of language . . . was a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view” (491), and “[t]he word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it” (495). A properly Bakhtinian methodology, then, centers on the relationship been a text’s micro-units (words and phrases) and the text as a whole, not on the relationship between novelistic form in the broader sense of a work’s structural configuration—the designs it prioritizes in moving key elements around like so many tectonic plates—and politics. To let Zimbabwean narrative truly come into its own in the critical arena, we thus need a theory that can account for the role of things like oppositionality and diversity, as they figure in novels, more than we need an applied Bakhtinianism that postulates such features as universal traits of novels. The political theorist Bonnie Honig, a recent interlocutor of William Connolly, suggests a pluralist model that I think is more germane to narrative and to Zimbabwean works especially. Whereas Connolly advocates “expansive pluralism” that heralds an unspecified proliferation of difference (48), Honig suggests an “agonistic” democratic model that privileges “dissonance, resistance, conflict or struggle” (”Political Theory” 2) as a practice instead of as a latent characteristic per Bakhtin. Her core vision of agonism is comprehensively argued in the 1993 book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, in which she pushes against the fact that political theorists typically “converge in their assumptions that success lies in . . . consolidating communities and identities” (2). For Honig, though, the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 351 aggregation of difference in the name of its advancement undermines the power of oppositional structures to refine rather than sublimate argumentative polarity. In her essay contribution to The New Pluralism, a book of essays about Connolly’s contributions to pluralist theory, Honig goes on to propose a more particularized version of debate and duality that emphasizes its democratic fertility (“Time of Rights”). It is one that I think has the potential to in some sense “salvage” key Zimbabwean novels from charges of ideological rigidity. In her view, the conditions of a productive democracy are conflictual and contestatory, not “pluralistic” in the immanent model of, for example, Rescher’s library or endlessly Venndiagrammatic as in Connolly’s schema. Honig suggests a compatibility between oppositional structures and pluralistic goals for the lived experience of which they are part; representational strategies that might be dismissed as binaristic or reductive can then achieve a more complex result that will transcend an overly fixed politics. Hence she elsewhere favors organizing political practice into “two impulses of political life, the impulse to keep the contest going and the impulse to be finally freed of the burdens of contest” (Political Theory 14). In contrast to Connolly’s expansiveness, Honig emphasizes the divisiveness of the public domain as the thing that preserves it. Her next level of specificity, though, is still more promising for the Zimbabwean case, especially, and also lays the foundation for circling back to the role of South Africa in the Zimbabwean novelistic imaginary. “What democracy has always been about is fighting over the public thing,” she remarks in a recent interview, before suggesting that “the state itself can be seen as an important public thing” (“Optimistic Agonist”). This lets us imagine Zimbabwe not through a vague but, too often, sanctimonious presupposition that plurality of meaning on its own can right political wrongs but through attention to what particular values and entities best symbolize and therefore shape Zimbabwean debate. Honig’s public “thing”— which, unlike Connolly’s more generic pluralism rooted in what Honig calls “theright-as-symbol” despite “the myriad operations of the actual right” (New Pluralism 107)—insists on argument as something that addresses real things. This is not to say that argument for Honig is antiphilosophical: Rescher, too, sees syncretism as problematic precisely because its lack of positional clarity is “not a very promising reaction to the reality of pluralism” (940). It is simply to suggest that argument requires an object whose multivalence is temporarily suspended in order that it may catalyze an array of responses. The example that Honig uses in her interview to illustrate this difference between what she calls “symbol” and “good” is drawn from a 2012 US presidential debate, which featured the Sesame Street character Big Bird as part of a discussion of public television’s defunding. Whereas the American Left, for a brief time, seized on the moment to illustrate how infantile the country’s political culture had become, Honig suggests that the incident really illustrates a deep need to argue—with a clear point of focus—over “public attachments to public things” (“Optimistic Agonist”). Big Bird here is both actual and symbolic, but debate about him requires a perception of his fixity. In the case of the canonical Zimbabwean writer Charles Mungoshi, restoring fixity and oppositionality to a productive role in narrative upsets accusations of his ideological collusion with colonial institutions, specifically the Southern Rhodesia Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 352 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 Literature Bureau, founded in 1954 to support indigenous literary output.10 Read through the imperative of nonessentialism—or a moralized and politicized plurality of meaning and identity—Mungoshi’s work does indeed seem symptomatic of a divisive mentality that warns Shonas against the “change” of urban centers in favor of confining them to rural lands. Frequently, as in his 1978 novel Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva (That’s How the Days Go By, sometimes translated as How Time Passes), this entails a dichotomy between the contemplative and essential space of the Shona village and the acceleration of morally precarious behavior in the capital city of Harare. One line from the book, “Chimboita huro imwe yeHarare tione mukasasvika gumi” (10) (translated in an essay by Itai Muhwati as “Try to have one sip [of Harare] and see if you won’t end up with ten sips”), explicitly demonizes the multiplicity of the modern. Similarly, the title of Mungoshi’s other Shona novel, Kunyarara Hakusi Kutaura? (1983), suggests a literal emphasis on opposition if it is translated as To Be Silent Is Not to Speak?—a dimension that gets lost in the more idiomatic translation of Silence Is Golden. The 1975 English-language Mungoshi classic Waiting for the Rain, with its revealing occlusion of South Africa in favor of a Shona-versus-overseas dichotomy, seems of a piece with this trend toward limiting either/ors. A child headed for an “overseas” (British) education elicits effusive pride from his father: “Why shouldn’t I talk of my own son?” he exclaims. “Who has done what we—the sons of Mandengu—have done?” (59). South Africa, in contrast, is such a common and sober destination for Zimbabweans in search of jobs that another character just briefly passes over the years he spent there in the 1940s (74). The novel’s range of imaginative possibility thus seems reduced to Zimbabwe and the West, a muchmaligned center-periphery configuration that keeps both entities in a fixed power relation. And yet the narrative’s brief gesture to South Africa here is telling, as it suggests Mungoshi’s interest in arguing about a concrete thing that has paradigmatic significance because, per Honig, it fosters argument. Recalling Hove’s unspecified dream space of international pluralism instead of the concrete destination of Cape Town or Johannesburg, the option of going “overseas” in Waiting for the Rain presents as either too threatening or too utopic, depending on which character is speaking, to be a useful object of debate. Instead, the specter of “overseas” works in tandem with South Africa’s hard-knocks familiarity to figure the object of debate as nonfixity, or plurality, itself. Mungoshi stages an argument about the merits of leaving a known context in which one is able to argue. To borrow a formulation from Walter Benn Michaels, the “antagonism between two social ideals” on display in conversations about migration in the novel’s Shona village is set to give way, with the introduction of the migratory paradigm as dominant, to “cultural difference that marks the coming of the new world” (28–29). 10 Emmanuel M. Chiwome, for example, charts the institutional and linguistic schism at the heart of modern Shona literature’s “birth” with a number of key works in 1956. “The Department was based in the Ministry of Information and its task was to ensure that colonialism was given a politically correct profile,” he writes, “to make it acceptable to the potentially rebellious Africans. . . . It is therefore a contradiction that novelistic practice, whose hallmark is innovation through exploration of reality, was to search for truth under the auspices of an intellectually and creatively oppressive propagandistic arm of government” (160). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 353 Likewise, the plot of Waiting for the Rain concerns a contrast between the paradigms of traditional and modern, rural and urban, and African versus Westwardlooking futures as elegantly marked by the brothers Lucifer and Garabha. As Lucifer accepts the patronage of a white city priest to study abroad, Garabha goes deeper into his traditional Shona drum circle; even as they jointly take over momentum from what at first seems like a wide-ranging cast of main characters, the brothers fail to connect as subjects within the narrative. At the end of the book, in a rising crest of opposition that demands a firm choice, the two literally go their separate ways. As Garabha learns to embrace his search for meaning while drumming and “singing, fading away into the bush” (165), the Eurocentric, upwardly mobile Lucifer forsakes his father’s poignant gift of traditional medicine for his journey. “He staggers to the corner where the medicine bottles are, gathers them up, then carefully with a piece of rock, he smashes them one by one into very small pieces,” Mungoshi writes. “Then he kneels down, locks up his two suitcases and carries them out into the waiting car” (172). Waiting for the Rain both warrants and has received more sustained critical attention than I can offer here, but even this introduction to the text is sufficient to reinforce a larger sense of the Zimbabwean canon’s pointed contrast with what Eileen Julien has theorized as the “extroverted” African novel of international acclaim, which successfully “registers in its very practice . . . the formidable imbalances and inequities that characterize Africa’s place in the world” (696) by representing global circulation. The Zimbabwean traits I have identified point toward an altogether different demand in terms of our reading practices. Mungoshi, like Bulawayo, registers something more like Honig’s agonism: both embed and sharpen opposing pairs in order to offer a structure in which the reader is urged not just to contemplate but perhaps to choose among competing situational options. At the very least, they are not oriented to what is often a uselessly intangible or ineffable idea of pluralism—such as Hove’s “dream-space,” Connolly’s “ineffability,” or Indian Ocean studies’ priority on “complication”—which has, for Zimbabweans, most visibly been plagued by its own problems in neighboring South Africa. My positive recasting of categorical fixity and opposition in Zimbabwean novels is no doubt open to criticism because political duality is so harmful in the country’s real life: as a friend remarked upon reading an earlier draft of this essay, it made him think of the fact that Mugabe’s party announces itself with a closed fist, while its main opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, uses an open hand. It is understandable that the modern Zimbabwean novel has provoked an ostensibly contradictory range of responses to its deep reliance on categorical demarcation. Muponde and Primorac’s emphases on “plurivocality” and the like seek to complicate not just how novels are received but the entire state apparatus behind what these scholars see as a blunt and often reductive literary-critical tradition. Nonetheless, I maintain that this approach remains insufficient because, while it attends to literary complexity in writers who favor a congenial fluidity of prose style (Vera, for Primorac), it necessarily reduces other works to the status of the less complex on the basis of their relative categorical clarity. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 354 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 Further exemplifying this difficult relation between analyzing novels and indicting their contexts of production and reception, Muponde and Primorac read three of the foundational Zimbabwean literature scholars from the 1980s— Musaemura Zimunya, George Kahari, and Flora Veit-Wild—as having minimized the complex relationship of key novelists like Mungoshi and Marechera to their social context. Zimunya, for example, is noted for his “essentialising use of ‘European’ as a denigrating descriptor” (xvi) and his ill-judged dismissal of Marechera as being too enmeshed in private, psychological life. Because there is general consensus that modern or “postcolonial” Zimbabwean literature—at least in terms of English prose—dates to this same decade with writers including Mungoshi, Marechera, and Stanley Samkange, among others, rising to national prominence, Muponde and Primorac’s critical revision is significant. Zimunya, Kahari, and other scholars whom they assess as exhibiting a crude Afro-centrism (xvii) were not simply reassessing canonical novelists with a long critical history. They were instantiating, rather, a formative convergence of “reductive” modern Zimbabwean literary scholarship and reductive modern Zimbabwean writing at the moment of their co-emergence. By contrast, today’s postcolonial critic must retrospectively restore the writing to its full complexity as a critique of its reception. I am, effectively, arguing that this is an unnecessary step if we imagine opposition as a Kantian scheme rather than as content: opposition in itself may serve the pluralist good and does not need to be critically wished away. In this sense, Muponde and Primorac are more firmly in step with broader Africanist postnational agendas in fields like Indian Ocean studies or, perhaps, affect theory, though the centrality of land rather than sea to Zimbabwe makes the former correspondence a theoretical rather than a thematic one. Muponde begins another piece from around the same time (“Worm and the Hoe”) by stating his goal of categorical expansionism outright: “The Third Chimurenga . . . is a virulent, narrowed-down version of Zimbabwean history, oversimplified and made rigid by its reliance on dualisms and binaries of insider/outsider, indigene/stranger, landed/landless, authentic/inauthentic, patriot/sell-out. The net effect of operating these binaries is the institution of othering as a permanent condition of political and cultural life where ‘difference’ translates unproblematically into ‘foe’” (176). And yet there are inconsistencies, when one looks deeper, in his assessments of why such categorical rigidity is a problem. Though Muponde leads the charge to debinarize Zimbabwean literary scholarship through an enhanced understanding of Marechera in particular, he also suggests that some of Marechera’s writing may indeed be insufficiently pluralistic. In a reading of a Marechera poem from the 1992 posthumous volume Cemetery of Mind, Muponde categorizes Marechera and the poet Tafataona Mahoso as people “who have continued to view their [black] victim state in terms of unresolved Manichean categories of black/white, power/ powerlessness, victim/victimizer” (186).11 The essay’s immediate reversion to more discussion of Mugabe makes it clear that Marechera’s skepticism about racial 11 The lines Muponde quotes are “reconciliation only works when justice is / seen to be done. / Otherwise all whites are lumped with the killers” (Marechera, qtd. in Muponde 184). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 355 reconciliation in Zimbabwe, for Muponde, may be more plurivocal than earlier critics would allow but still falls short of the multiplicity that is commonly upheld in the postcolonial field. I want to suggest that Muponde is right about the limitations of racialized thinking but that he and Primorac also miss the mark on what Marechera’s frequent dichotomies might achieve. Marechera—who to this day inspires what the Zimbabwean writer Memory Chirere has called “Marechera-mania” among frustrated teenagers on account of his rebellious behavior against the late-colonial state (at Oxford University, especially)—is a strong case for reading the destructive effects of foreclosed possibility on and in an addled mind. At one point in The House of Hunger, the young male narrator stands on a hill looking down on his township with a character named Immaculate, his brother’s abused lover. “She made me want to dream,” he writes of his simultaneous attraction to and loathing of her, “made me believe in visions, in hope. But the rock and grit of the earth denied this” (12). This is, from one vantage, an obvious moment of reality-induced schizophrenia, with the narrator entertaining a range of possibilities at the same time as he stamps them out because of where he lives. As the South African authority on Marechera, Annie Gagiano has written, “Fragmentation may be thought of as [The House of Hunger’s] major theme—the disruption of human potential characteristic of so many African societies . . . in the latter part of the millennium and beyond.” From another point of view, though, Marechera captures a capacity for self-argumentation that allows his groundbreaking narrative record of subjectivity to take form; indeed, his divisiveness may even constitute a more important innovation than the complex rendering of subjectivity. The indeterminate scale of “fragmentation” does not quite capture the extremity of juxtaposition in the above example: there are two options here, dreams or rocks. As many times as the narrator says things like, “There are fragments and snatches of fragments. The momentary fingerings of a guitar” (60), he resorts to clear categorical opposition. “I was being severed from my own voice,” he states about one-third of the way through the novella. “It was like this: English is my second language, Shona my first. When I talked it was in the form of an interminable argument, one side of which was always expressed in English and the other in Shona” (30). The propulsive division that the phrase “interminable argument” raises here in describing Zimbabwe’s most common linguistic situation is a marked empirical and paradigmatic departure from, again, the oft-remarked linguistic diversity of South Africa, liberal pluralism’s concrete regional representative (it has eleven official tongues, while Zimbabwe has three). While one could not push the sociolinguistic dimension too far as a literary analogy, it is worth noting that this difference in linguistic range has been a provocative literary trope. In Christopher Mlalazi’s out-of-print 2009 novel Many Rivers, about a perilous crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa across the Limpopo River in search of work, an Ndebele man in Johannesburg is disoriented by the combination of cultural intermingling and interpersonal violence he encounters. In this biting indictment of a common journey captured in the Shona phrase “kumhiri kwaLimpopo,” which I Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 356 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 would render idiomatically as something like “on the other side,” Mlalazi uses the naı̈veté of his (literally) battered main character to upbraid any sense that multiplicity is a “good” on its own. Likewise, even as Marechera introduces additional elements into the description of his mental struggle, he holds fast to their presentation as argument rather than syncretic linking. “I felt gagged by this absurd contest between Shona and English,” he notes. “I knew no other language: my French and Latin were enough to make me wary of conversing in them. However, some nights I could feel the French and the Latin fighting it out in the shadowy background of the English and Shona” (30). Such nested oppositions—the escape from a choice between two socially dominant options to yet another choice between the languages of his colonial education—perfectly capture the challenge of Rescher’s defining question, “how to respond to pluralism?” (97). As The House of Hunger’s narrator escapes his “gagging” from what seems like the local or immediate problem of English versus Shona, he finds not resolution of conflict through increased options but, instead, a second pair of languages that epitomizes Zimbabwe’s colonial legacy. One opposition, then, is couched within a deeper one to generate Marechera’s narrative. Even as argumentative tensions here go unresolved, they keep legible terms in play on either side. Muponde and Primorac, in their focus on Marechera’s “plurivocality,” thus reflect the limitations of a far-reaching postcolonial bias toward seeing only maximal and categorically porous plurality as properly at odds with political and epistemic violence. While a reading practice set on instantiating difference would no doubt interpret Marechera’s inner conflicts as evidence of his psychological entrapment within the Rhodesian legacy, we might also ask how lines in The House of Hunger like “The fights completely muzzled me” (30) are structurally distinctive. What, given Marechera’s canonical status, do they suggest about a presciently Zimbabwean way of keeping narrative going amid a regional situation in which, increasingly, neither nationalism (Mugabe) nor liberal pluralism (the “new” South Africa) seems viable? And what, in this stalemate, are the most significant implications of loosening plurality’s conceptual grip on our thinking about novels from this part of the world? For starters, as Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff contend in their essay “Theory from the South,” Africa is now at the forefront of debates about modernity and democratic practice, not just because of easy finger-pointing at “failed state(s)” but because, increasingly, theorists and citizens alike are questioning what democracy’s end is meant to be. More specifically, my argument offers a new context in which to understand the challenges of creating a “transnational” critical public, given critics’ persistent difficulty in reconciling what seem to be Zimbabwean writers’ contradictory investments in de-essentializing nationalist narratives and narrativizing oppositional geographic relationships. To conclude, then, I want to return to Bulawayo’s recent We Need New Names. An extended discussion of the novel’s contrastive schema reveals what I think is a deliberate exaggeration of difference through, now, a global as opposed to colonial lens, which nonetheless still insists on questions of comparative value. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 357 On the broadest formal level, Bulawayo employs virtually no “liminal” free indirect speech (just a first-person narrator and an intervening omniscient voice) and depicts sanguine racial plurality, like the “crowds and crowds of white people and black people and brown people” (158) at Barack Obama’s televised inauguration, only in mediated form. Whereas We Need New Names, from a social rather than structural perspective, would be an obvious successor to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s much-taught 1988 female coming-of-age story Nervous Conditions (in which an enterprising young girl from a Shona village first grows corn and later rises through the private-school system en route to her likely future migration to the United Kingdom), the competitive structure that Bulawayo’s narrative and narrator internalize invites comparison with Marechera. “There are two homes inside my head,” she says at one point, “home before [the township of] Paradise, and home in Paradise; home one and home two. Home one was best. A real house” (193). Further down the page, describing her life in Detroit, the narrator Darling expands the reference to include: Home one, home two, and home three. There are four homes inside Mother of Bones’s [her aunt and new guardian] head: home before the white people came to steal the country, and a king ruled; home when the white people came to steal the country, and then there was war; home when black people got our stolen country back after independence; and then the home of now. Home one, home two, home three, home four. When somebody talks about home, you have to listen carefully so you know exactly which one the person is referring to. (193–94) As in the example about one sip or ten from Mungoshi’s Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva, such deceptively simple constructions have profound implications. A configuration of two homes offers the grounds for Darling to make a categorical evaluation and, presumably, determine what sorts of particular goods and conditions would enrich her life (“[r]adios blaring,” for example, add value, whereas tin roofs detract from it [193]). The proliferation of homes both concrete and in terms of historical periodization, on the other hand, makes it difficult to even keep track of basic narrative-conversational progression. It is fitting, therefore, that whereas the main international point of reference in Nervous Conditions is England, Bulawayo introduces South Africa as a key site of disenchantment. Dramatically recalling the first pages of Mlalazi’s Many Rivers about Zimbabwean crossings to South Africa (both writers are from a close-knit community in Bulawayo, so it may indeed be an allusion), We Need New Names refers to a family relation who “had been eaten by a crocodile as he tried to cross the Limpopo River” (205). Even before that, Darling notes that “Mother had not wanted Father to leave for South Africa to begin with, but it was at that time when everybody was going to South Africa and other countries, some near, some far, some very, very far” (93). As in the example of concrete homes one and two as set against home’s later, confusing proliferation, South Africa—an actual “good” in terms of its concrete focalization of family disagreements—here gives way to a shapeless transnationalism: South Africa is the only place that is named. South Africa is, as both Bulawayo and Mlalazi are aware, the obvious next step for Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 358 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 the majority of aspirational or desperate Zimbabweans. But in the novel’s clear representation of a more “pluralistic” liberal state, it is also the object of a targeted ambivalence that goes back to the very self-definition of the novel in Zimbabwe. To come full circle, then, Bulawayo may well suggest an overly schematic narrative of hope’s deflowering: the naive anticipation of a move from poor African township to big Western city (Detroit) is the realist inversion of the upward-mobility tale, the photonegative of cosmopolitanism’s more inclusive “good” contemporaneity. At one point, the universal Zimbabwean voice that occasionally disrupts the book’s first-person narration remarks, “And when we got to America we took our dreams, looked at them tenderly . . . and put them away” (243). In tension all the while, though, is a series of comparisons between another two entities, represented by Zimbabwe and South Africa, whose merits and demerits interact not as dreams turned to cynical reality but as a choice to be made between tough options in a world with no perfect cure. “All I know is that I’m certainly not clamoring to go across the borders to live where I’m called a kwerekwere” (94), says a Zimbabwean woman to her husband upon his own return from South Africa to die of AIDS. And yet even in a fairly remote part of the country, “things are now being paid for in U.S. dollars and South African rands” (205). There are two distinct forms of relation represented in this choice of currencies: the first internalizes Western powers as a locus of exaggerated and often vague hope or rejection, while the second invests in a savvier relation to a known quantity of pluralism in South Africa. In this essay as a whole, such oppositions ultimately serve to foreground a different sort of choice in terms of an interpretive bottom line. Africanist criticism at this transitional juncture from postcolonialism to a broader transnational field still too often heralds a vague and sanctimonious plurality in the forms it seeks out or censures. On the contrary, it should now be digging deeper to grapple with locally and narratively emplaced structures of debate. In the agonistic tradition of the novel in Zimbabwe, then, I see an overdue critical intervention. The hyperpluralist alternative to structural conflict, in Connolly’s words, is “straddling two or more perspectives to maintain tension between them” (4; emphasis added). But instead of two firm hands, this model requires more legs than any writer can have. * * * jeanne-marie jackson is assistant professor of world anglophone literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation appeared in 2015. She is currently at work on a project titled The African Novel of Ideas: Intellection in the Age of Global Writing (forthcoming), and she coedited a 2017 special issue of Research in African Literatures on religion and the (post)secular in African writing. Works Cited Allen, Michael H. Globalization, Negotiation, and the Failure of Transformation in South Africa. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 359 Anderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Baghramian, Maria. “On the Plurality of Conceptual Schemes.” Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity. Ed. Maria Baghramian and Attracta Ingram. London: Routledge, 2000. 44–59. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhalovich. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000. Ed. Dorothy J. Hale. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. 481–509. Benn Michaels, Walter. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. ———. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlin, Isaiah. “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will.” The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. 219–52. Bond, Patrick. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. London: Pluto, 2000. Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. New York: Back Bay, 2013. Chiwome, Emmanuel M. “Modern Shona Literature as a Site of Struggle, 1956–2000.” Zimbabwean Transitions: Essays on Zimbabwean Literature in English, Ndebele, and Shona. Ed. Mbongeni Z. Malaba and Geoffrey V. Davis. Spec. issue of Matatu 34.1 (2007): 159–71. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. “Theory from the South; or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa.” Anthropological Forum 22.2 (2012): 113–31. Connolly, William. Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. 1982. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Seattle: Seal, 1988. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 5–20. Deckard, Sharae, et al. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of WorldLiterature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Desai, Gaurav. Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Gagiano, Annie. Rev. of The House of Hunger, by Dambudzo Marechera. LitNet, African Library < http://www.oulitnet.co.za/africanlib/hunger.asp > (accessed 13 Mar. 2018). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 360 NOVEL AUGUST 2018 Habila, Helon. Rev. of We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo. Guardian 20 June 2014 < https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo -review >. Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Hamilton, Lawrence. Are South Africans Free? London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Harris, Ashleigh. “Awkward Form and Writing the African Present.” JWTC: Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, Salon 7 (2014) < jwtc.org.za/test/ashleigh_harris .htm > . Hofmeyr, Isabel. “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.3 (2012): 584–90. 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Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Johannesburg: Wits UP, 2012. Marechera, Dambudzo. The House of Hunger. London: Heinemann, 1978. Mbembe, Achille. “Consumed by Our Lust for Lost Segregation.” Mail and Guardian 28 Mar. 2013 < https://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-28-00-consumed-by-our-lust-for-lostsegregation > . Miller, J. Hillis. “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure, II.” Georgia Review 30.2 (1976): 330–48. Mlalazi, Christopher. Many Rivers. Bedford: Lion, 2009. Moorthy, Shanti, and Ashraf Jamal, eds. Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2009. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/339/539563/339jackson.pdf by JOHNS HOPKINS MT WASHINGTON user on 17 September 2018 JACKSON PLURALITY IN QUESTION 361 Muhwati, Itai. “A Critical Appreciation of Victimhood in Mungoshi’s Shona Novels: A Critical Study.” Zambezia 32.1–2 (2005): 78–94. 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Nyamfukudza, Stanley. “To Skin a Skunk: Some Observations on Zimbabwe’s Intellectual Development.” Skinning the Skunk: Facing Zimbabwean Futures. Ed. Mai Palmberg and Ranka Primorac. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2005. 16–25. Paperno, Irina. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Primorac, Ranka. The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe. London: Tauris, 2006. Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Veit-Wild, Flora. “De-silencing the Past—Challenging ‘Patriotic History’: New Books on Zimbabwean Literature.” Research in African Literatures 37.3 (2006): 193–204. ———. Teachers, Preachers, Non-believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature. London: Zell, 1992. Wicomb, Zoë. October. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2014. ———. Playing in the Light. Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2006. 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