Excess in A Brief History of Seven Killings

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Here we must ask, however, if James in fact has concrete reasons for "making an important case for a new way to think about and experience" Anglophone Caribbean writing. For me, the novel's inhabitation of Caribbean literature's definitive aesthetics—the vernacular for example—is not a failed approximation, but rather works to communicate, among other things, how cultural nationalist narratives have been coopted for neoliberal ends, in ways that are relevant within and beyond Caribbean discourses.

Beginning in the 1920s, early Caribbean writers worked at creating a tradition of literary anti-coloniality that linked postcolonial nationhood to the fostering of indigenous cultural traditions at the same time that it offered correctives to English literary conceptualizations of the empire's colonies and their people. Thus George Lamming argued that the elevation of the peasant to literary subject fulfilled the desire for indigenous literary origins that owe little or nothing to foreign influence,1 a program he and writers like Sam Selvon set out to fulfill in books such as The Lonely Londoners. Selvon's novel comprehensively embodies what an indigenous nation-embodying subject would look and sound like on the page. It is the accessibility and readability of this indigenous aesthetic that undoubtedly made earlier novels more palatable for non-Caribbean audiences, breaking ground for authors like James in the realm of globally celebrated Anglophone fiction.

But ease, readability, and palatability are all things that, Ellis rightly notes, A Brief History lacks. To the extent that James's novel seems to depart from the established Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition, however, it is actually representative of a contemporary cohort of diasporic writers whose fiction similarly departs from the established parameters of their literary traditions. Contemporary fiction written by immigrant and immigrant descended authors who live (or split time) in the United States and teach in writing programs in American universities, such as James, Chimamanda Adichie, Junot Díaz, and Teju Cole, constitutes a major site in which a recognition of the commonalities within global (rather than national) economic inequity is becoming visible. Individually and collectively, these authors' writing makes more visible how contemporary neoliberal capitalism relies on the ideological frames of national sovereignty for obfuscating global causes of material inequity.

Part of the point here is that—as Ellis's references to Bolaño imply—these authors don't see their indigenous literary tradition as the only ones in which they work. It is thus necessary to put A Brief History in conversation with contemporary fiction by other diasporic writers who also use departures from literary tradition as a means of confronting and challenging what they see as the neoliberal tendencies lurking in twentieth-century fiction. The proliferation of narratives about difference, globally, in the wake of colonial independence movements and the American Civil Rights movement, shows how subaltern writing assumed the burden of purveying knowledge about difference that was supposed to remedy problems of identarian inequality. But as Walter Benn Michaels suggests, the identitarian underpinnings of such work contribute directly to neoliberalism's disavowal of economic inequities, and moreover serve to distract from increasing material inequity.2

To the extent that we imagine political sovereignty and liberation as achievable solely in the terms of independent nationhood, moreover, we miss the ways in which nationalist discourses work to effectively depoliticize crucial problems of sovereignty within an economy structured by capitalism's global reach. As James Ferguson argues in relation to Africa, for instance, we attribute the failure of economies within the developing world only to the failure of individual nations, ignoring the more far-reaching forces of uneven transnational capitalist policies that foment problems of underdevelopment, economic dependence, instability and inequity (64-65).3 To note this is not to diminish or deny the progressive and empowering possibilities of national independence movements.  It is, however, to inquire into the limits of the national framework. If understanding problems of sovereignty solely in national terms works to depoliticize larger and transnational forces of disempowerment such as uneven international trade agreements or discriminatory immigration and labor policies, it also works to obstruct the recognition of the various commonalities among fledgling nations, the world over, that have never really been independent of the influence of larger industrialized nations such as the United States.