Plurality in Question: Zimbabwe and the Agonistic African Novel JEANNE-MARIE JACKSON Postcolonialism and the field that succeeds it—known variously in English depart- ments 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 ledthe 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 epistemo- logically 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 episte- mological 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 anti- essentialism, 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 typifi- cation, 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