English Research Seminar --- Dr Christine Okoth (Kings College London) Planning and the Genres of the Postcolony

School of English Research Seminar featuring Dr Christine Okoth (Kings College London).

While the event of revolution has produced both an extensive theoretical vocabulary and a literary and cultural archive for postcolonial studies, the political and economic organization of the postcolonial state has proven a more vexed object of analysis. The historical period following formal decolonisation often revealed competing interpretations of liberation that the focus on revolution partly obscured. In conversation with recent scholarship on the cultural dimensions of the Cold War, this paper proposes a reconsideration of ‘planning' as a means of thinking about experiments with literary genre. This paper is particularly interested in the interactions between Afro-diasporic writers and the planned economies of the African continent including Ghana, Zambia, Guinea, and Tanzania. Through brief references to the works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Maryse Condé, I draw together the documents of economic planning that were produced at the end of formal colonial rule in African nation-states and the genre of the report that writers reached for in order to consider the possibilities and limitations of the state's attempts at reordering the racial hierarchies of the global economy.

Dr Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic in the Department of English at King's College London. Her work is primarily concerned with questions of environment and race in contemporary Black literature and visual art. Prior to coming to King's, Christine was Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick where she worked on Mike Niblett and Chris Campbell's Leverhulme-funded project ‘World Literature and Commodity Frontiers.' She is currently writing a book entitled Race and the Raw Material and her work has been published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, Cambridge Quarterly and Textual Practice.