interrogate the relationships among literature, violence, and human dignity on the one hand, and, on the other, the narrative architecture of the Bildungsroman at its point of convergence with the liberal discourse of human rights. Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, more than any other Kenyan novel, is not just a mere reconstruction of how Kenya’s cataclysmic war of decolonization is “remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized” (Paul Fussell, qtd. in Andrews and McGuire 2016, 3), but also a text that reminds us of the potential of the Bildungsroman to engender a “new kind of social content for the novel as form and the possibility of new kinds of narration” (Jameson 2006, 101).
My rereading of Ngugi’s classical text from a human rights perspective has two implications. First, it calls attention not only to the importance of literary history, but also the importance of interrogating some of the foundational texts of African literature through emerging critical theories. To read Ngugi’s work from this perspective is to acknowledge that the restoration of the humanity of Africans that was taken away by the violent process of colonization is a theme that percolates all his creative and polemical works. Ngugi’s concern with the historical violation of the human rights of Africans, and, indeed, of black people, of the working classes, and of minorities throughout the world, is well known. Reading his earliest novel within a human rights framework acknowledges the complex and emancipatory dialectic that characterizes his works. My contention is that if his works are read through emerging theories of human rights, there is a lot to be excavated in his early novels that tend to be seen as less ideological than his later novels. Second, understanding narrative and criticism as generative might clarify some of the critical gaps in the scholarship of Ngugi’s work that are a result of either focusing on its historical and institutional contexts or on his ideological leanings, both of which approaches focus for the most part on the manifest thematics of nationalism and decolonization on the one hand, and the influence of Marxist aesthetics on the other. Ngugi’s attachment to specific geographical constructs, locations, historical temporalities, and socio‐cultural frameworks is what enables his very particularized critique of white supremacist ideologies that undergird colonial domination while at the same time questioning the idea of colonialism as progress and civilization.
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Notes
1 1 See Irele (1990). Irele argues that a critical examination of African literature necessarily raises the question of its distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from other literatures.
