The politics and aesthetics of postcolonial disillusionment: transcolonial resistance in Algerian and Ghanaian literature (1960-1980)

Abstract

This thesis explores the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial disillusionment through a transcolonial reading of Algerian and Ghanaian literature produced between 1960 and 1980. It examines how Rachid Boudjedra, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Kateb Yacine deploy formal disruption to critique the failures of decolonisation, unsettle nationalist ideologies, and resist the institutionalisation of myth, symbolic violence and historical erasure.

Focusing on two distinct but complementary literary modes, the novel and theatre, this study is divided into two parts. Part one explores the ways in which Boudjedra and Armah reconfigure the novel to expose the ideological fragility of postcolonial nationhood, using disjointed temporality and grotesque realism to destabilize official historiography. Their works dismantle the myth of linear decolonisation by foregrounding bodily decay, disrupted temporality, and the psychic afterlives of colonialism, refusing redemptive closure, and opting instead for aesthetic rupture that allows suppressed histories and oppressed subjectivities to emerge. Part two turns to Kateb Yacine’s theatre where the stage becomes a site of insurgent performance. In La Poudre d’intelligence, the folkloric figure of Djeha embodies epistemic disorder and transgressive mobility, challenging patriarchal and religious authority. Mohamed prends ta valise (1971) and Boucherie de l’espérance ou Palestine trahie (1978) extend this critique to colonialism, Zionism, and postcolonial complicity, invoking Palestine as a geopolitical referent and a transnational symbol of betrayal and solidarity.

By placing Francophone and Anglophone texts in dialogue, the thesis adopts a transcolonial approach that reveals shared strategies of resistance across linguistic and geopolitical boundaries. It argues that literature emerges as a fertile site for reimagining alternative ways of knowing and being. It reclaims postcolonial disillusionment as a generative critical condition, one that unsettles inherited narratives and opens new aesthetic and political horizons beyond national frameworks and the vertical axis of interaction. Instead, it foregrounds horizontal connections of shared narratives and aesthetic responses.