Unfinished business: dictatorial literature of post-independence Latin America and Africa

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Periodical article

Title:	Unfinished business: dictatorial literature of post-independence Latin America and Africa
Author:	Kubayanda, Josaphat
Year:	1997
Periodical:	Research in African Literatures
Volume:	28
Issue:	4
Pages:	38-53
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Subsaharan Africa South America
Subjects:	authoritarianism novels
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820783
Abstract:	Tyranny is an endemic social and political problem in Africa and Latin America. An authoritarian reality similar to colonialism replaced the utopian dream underlying the movement for independence on those continents. Literary works from these regions portray totalizing codes that pinpoint an unfinished business of decolonization, for independence seems to be a self-serving arrangement between the European colonial centres and the emergent ruling elites. Novels by the African writers Mongo Beti (Cameroun), Alioum Fantouré (Guinea), and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and the Latin American writers Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Augusto Roa Bastos delineate this social condition. Their novels are characterized by a pervasive cynicism and a sense of fear and humiliation (Beti), a pattern of disorder and disillusion (Fantouré), and fragmentation, an illogic form and madness (Soyinka). Bibliogr.