Writing has always been my way of reconnecting myself to the landscape of my birth and upbringing.

Not surprisingly the natural landscape dominates the East African literary imagination. This awareness of the land as the central actor in our lives distinguishes East African literature from others in the continent and it certainly looms large in my own writing from The River Between to Matigari.

—Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi made two powerful statements that were going to dominate the nature of his critical and cultural work in the 1980s and 1990s and to perhaps haunt him at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He argued, first of all, that his decision to write fiction in Gikuyu, an African language, constituted an epistemological break with his previous practices; he also argued that the essays collected in this volume signified his “farewell to the English language as a vehicle for any of my writing” (xiv). For a brief period in the late 1980s, Ngugi was so determined to fulfil his pledge to abandon English as his linguistic medium that he even made conference presentations to European and American audiences in Gikuyu and published a significant critical essay in his mother tongue in the prestigious Yale Journal of Criticism. But soon after the publication of this essay, Ngugi returned, without explanation, to his familiar role as a critic of imperial European languages writing in English. By the time he took up a senior professorship at New York University in the early 1990s, it was clear that Ngugi's effort to use Gikuyu as the language of both his fiction and critical discourse had been defeated by the reality of exile and American professional life. Ngugi tried to keep Gikuyu as an important part of his intellectual and literary work through Mũtiiri, a journal he founded and edited through New York University, but in reading the criticism and fiction that he was presenting through this pioneering publication, one could not help noticing that his work was being haunted by the pressures of producing knowledge in an African language within the limits and demands of Western institutions of knowledge. What did it mean to produce a journal in Gikuyu when Ngugi was separated from his immediate readers and what he would consider to be the vital linguist resources of an African language? What dictated the themes and cultural grammar promoted by a Gikuyu journal produced in the heart of the most cosmopolitan city in the world?

In regard to the first question, Ngugi's efforts to produce a professional journal in an African language were impressive. The first volume of Mũtiiri offered essays on specialized topics in fields such as sociolinguistics, computing, and social theory that had rarely been taken up in publications in African languages. At the same time, however, there was no doubt that Ngugi saw the function of the journal not simply as communicative (the sharing and dissemination of knowledge within a community of readers united by a certain set of experiences and interests), but also vindictive (he wanted to prove that an African language could perform certain linguistic, philosophical, and scientific functions as well as European languages). And thus even in its concern with things Gikuyu or African, the journal seemed to function under the anxieties created by its conditions of production and distribution.

In regard to the second question, then, the very professionalism of the journal, its impressive list of contributors and choice of subjects, reflected the Ngugi's need to “Africanize” the practice of producing knowledge within the Western academy and also to “Westernize” Gikuyu discourses on subjects ranging from romance to multiculturalism. At first, Mũtiiri appeared to be an important project in Ngugi's critical discourse both because it embodied the kind of epistemological rupture he had sought when he “broke” with English and because it provided the editor and his associates with a space in which the cultural project initiated at Kamĩrĩĩthu could be continued in exile. On closer examination, however, the concerns of the journal seemed circumscribed not by its choice of subjects, readers, or contributors, but by its failure to rethink and expand the Kamĩrĩĩthu project. If the significance of Kamĩrĩĩthu lay in its challenge to the bourgeois public sphere and its reconceptualization of the role of audiences in performance, as I have argued elsewhere, the journal seemed to be acting as a forum for representing the cultural disenchantment of a Gikuyu émigré intelligentsia (see Gikandi, forthcoming). The journal's concern with questions of nation, culture, and language was being overdetermined not by the workers and peasants who had animated Ngugi's work at Kamĩrĩĩthu, but the ressentiment of metropolitan readers distanced from Kenyan sources and concerns. If the issues in the first volume are to be considered representative, Mũtiiri was being driven not so much by the concerns of Kenyan workers and peasants, but by the rhetoric of American identity politics and postcolonial nostalgia. The peasants and workers whom Ngugi had invited into the institutions of cultural production during his Kamĩrĩĩthu phase seemed to have disappeared in a project produced in their own language.

Did the language of Mũtiiri, then, make any difference to the kind of topics it seemed to favor or the discursive economies it seemed to promote? What did it mean to produce literature and theory in an African language according to the protocols established by American and European institutions? These questions were made more urgent by what appeared to be Ngugi's sudden—and unaccounted—return to the English he had loudly rejected in Decolonising the Mind, a return that was manifested in his interregnum work, Moving the Center, his revised edition of Writers in Politics, and more decisively in his Clarendon Lectures published as Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams. Now, Ngugi's “return” to English was perhaps not surprising given the difficulties of working and living in exile. The more complicated problem for students of his works has been how to read a radical cultural politics within this “return” to English and to provide a critical accounting for Ngugi's theories and practices as they were being shaped, not by the peasants and workers of Kenya, or even African institutions of higher learning, but by the very Western establishment whose policies and practices he had previously attacked.

In the following examination of Ngugi's ambiguous adventure in the culture of English, I am interested in exploring two related questions: What is the relationship between the practice of critique (one directed at what the author now calls “capitalist fundamentalism” [Ngugi, Penpoints 130]) and the site of enunciation (the American university)? Whatever happened to Marxism in Ngugi's ideological schema and aesthetic? I will address these questions by making three discursive moves: I will first consider Ngugi's role as a public intellectual because I want to make the claim that what has changed in his reflections on questions about language, literature, and the state, is a direct result of his displaced political and intellectual function. I will then examine some of the key revisions Ngugi makes in the new edition of Writers in Politics as evidence of this displacement. Finally, I will turn to his Clarendon lectures as examples of what I consider—in a nonpejorative sense—to be his reentry into the institution of English (see Gikandi, Maps of Englishness 32-44). An international audience obsessed with Ngugi's pronouncement on certain metropolitan concerns such as race, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism is bound to miss the simple factor that from the advent of self-government in Kenya in 1962 to his forced exile in 1982, the source of his authority as a writer and critic often depended on the role he cultivated and played as an intellectual with a keen interest in public affairs. Ngugi's most influential essays were not produced in the seminar rooms of the African university or written for learned journals; on the contrary, they began as reflections on questions that were central to the definition and redefinition of the colonial and postcolonial public sphere. For example, Ngugi's historic critique of the role of Christianity in Africa took the form of an address to the governing body of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, the spiritual home of Kenya's postcolonial elite in the 1960s and 1970s. His famous essay on the abolition of the English department, a work now considered central to debates about the curriculum in “postcolonial countries,” was originally a memo (co-written with Owour Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong), submitted to the senate of the University College of East Africa in Nairobi (see Ngugi, Homecoming, Appendix). The signature essays in the original edition of Writers in Politics were written as direct interventions in a raging debate on the teaching of literature in Kenya and the place of English in a postcolonial African state. During the same period, Ngugi wrote important articles and essays either as a mode of public commentary on topical issues or, as in the case of the two essays on J. M. Kariuki collected in Writers in Politics, as an intellectual intervention in the shaping of public discourse at a moment of national crisis.

It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to note that for most of the 1960s and 1970s, Ngugi's pronouncement on public matters provided a radical point of debate and, in some cases, an important conduit, through which ideas could flow from the University of Nairobi's radical student and faculty caucus to a petty bourgeois readership increasingly disenchanted with the postcolonial state. The theoretical significance of these public debates can be discerned both within their more immediate context—what one may call their site of reception and dissemination—and in their universal implication. Three points need to be considered in any location of these discourses both within their local and global contexts: First, the topicality of these essays determined both their tenor and conceptual claims. In other words, it was because such issues as church and state, curriculum reform, and political assassinations were topical in their immediate context that Ngugi could find himself functioning in a linguistic universe defined by what has come to be called, after Habermas, communicative reason—the “will to communicate something about a shared lifeworld and to reach a common understanding about it” (see Coole 224). Second, the communicative reason assumed in the original edition of Writers in Politics arose from Ngugi's assumption—quite evident in the rhetorical posture he adopted at the time—that such discourses were intended to redefine the bourgeois public sphere by changing the terms by which political discourse was conducted, represented, and received.

Let us consider an exemplary case of Ngugi's intervention in Kenyan political discourse. On the week of 24 March 1975, a few days after the assassination of J. M. Kariuki, a leading opponent of the Kenyan Government, Ngugi wrote an essay for The Weekly Review, an essay that stands out as the best illustration of the “communicative rationality” that made his critical interventions so powerful. In the days preceding Ngugi's intervention, the city of Nairobi and the country as a whole were gripped by fear and a sense of chaos: the public was in outrage, students had blockaded the streets of the capital, and a mute government was, in the view of its emboldened opponents, on the brink of collapse. Amidst the chaos and confusion surrounding Kariuki's death, Ngugi's essay began by providing a human face to the politician's mutilated body and some logical explanation to the competing narratives surrounding the murder: Ngugi recalled how he had met Kariuki in the early days of independence and his numerous encounters with the dead politician during key moments of their country's history; he was also careful to call attention to their shared identity as writers. Kariuki had published Mau Mau Detainee in 1963, on the eve of Kenya's independence, and Ngugi had welcomed the work both as the first insider's view of “Mau Mau” and as an exemplar of a different kind of political education, one in direct opposition to the colonial education the novelist had acquired at Makerere University College, an education which, as he notes in Writers in Politics, had blinded him “to the true nature of colonialism and imperialism” (83).

In this essay, then, what Ngugi was doing—perhaps more than saying—was that contrary to the public's perception, Kariuki's assassination was not a senseless and irrational political act. On the contrary, given his history and experience as a product of anticolonial resistance in a postcolonial landscape dominated by infamous supporters of the colonial regime, Kariuki posed a real threat to the postcolonial state. There was, therefore, a clear rationale for his assassination. Ngugi admitted that he too had shared the confusion and bewilderment that the assassination had triggered in its early hours, but he indirectly appealed to his readers to go beyond this “irrational” response and confront the painful truth: “Who betrayed J. M. Kariuki? Who killed him?. … it was we, we who have kept silent and propped up an unjust oppressive system” (Ngugi, Writers in Politics 85).

Ngugi ended his essay by calling attention to the symbolism of Mwangi Kariuki's name—a generation resurrected—and proffered it as a harbinger of a moment of revolution beyond the current crisis. By locating Kariuki both in the past (in the history of nationalism) and in the future (as a figure of a revolution yet to be born), what this essay did, in a quite remarkable and unexpected way, was redirect the passions generated by the politician's death into a rational communicative exchange, one guided by measured rhetoric and appropriate symbolism. By the end of the week, a petty bourgeois readership that had been outraged enough by Kariuki's assassination to burn the property of its protectors, was now clamoring for a discourse that would take it beyond the crisis of death and despair.

Now, the issue of whether Ngugi's public intervention—the redirecting of bourgeois passion into a rational discourse—actually saved the Kenyatta regime is highly debatable. What concerns me here—and this is my third point about Ngugi's role as a public intellectual—is how his intervention provided direction to both common readers and radical opponents of the postcolonial state. It is my claim that Ngugi's oppositional role, while genuinely driven by the desire to protect the proletariat and peasant interest within the bourgeois public sphere, depended on its reception (that is, its reading) rather than the force of the arguments he presented. In other words, the efficacy and effect of essays such as the tribute to J. M. Kariuki discussed above depended not so much on Ngugi's agitation—or longing for revolution—but on his ability to persuade his readers to deploy this discourse as a mode of rationalizing their own implication in the oppressive system. In reading Ngugi's reflections on the assassination of Kariuki, middle-class readers in Kenya had their first lessons in the discourse on underdevelopment and neocolonialism.

Similarly, what made Ngugi's pronouncements on issues ranging from the literary canon to political culture central to public discourse in Kenya was not their originality or their theoretical import, but their capacity to change the desires of their audience through the process of reading. The potential for change embedded in the essays collected in Writers in Politics depended not so much on the claims they were making, but by what Ross Chambers would call their readability: “Textual authority is not determined by the social characteristics of an author so much as it is produced in specific circumstances of reading, and the specificity of a given text will arise from the way the relation of text and reader is mediated, whether and whenever the text is read” (5-6). The readability of Ngugi's essays—and by implication their capacity to influence the public—depended on the presumed life world shared by the writer and his readers.¹ It is, indeed, one of the great ironies of Ngugi's critical practice that the essays that had the most impact in a Kenyan context (the Kariuki and the curriculum debate essays are exemplary here) did not even interest international readers. In their close relationship and concerned with local cultural politics, these essays did not aspire for the kind of universality that now seems to dominate Ngugi's recent critical work. I will return to this point later.

What needs to be underscored here is the simple—but not always obvious—fact that Ngugi's critical practice had been developed in response to local needs and by the novelist's role as a public intellectual forced to define himself against the pressures of everyday life in the postcolony. If we keep this point in mind, we can better understand how, by being forced into exile in 1982, Ngugi was deprived of the communicative contact that had made his work so central to the transformation of public debates in Kenya. In exile Ngugi had to retool his critical practice away from his native grounds, as it were; he needed to develop a new intellectual project outside the boundaries of the nation. But for most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was not clear what form this project would take. What was apparent, however, was the fact that he was confronted with the same choices as other postcolonial émigré intellectuals: he could either become a “native informant,” processing and reprocessing African worlds for Western readers; or he could recast his discourse in the language of cosmopolitanism and thus reread local knowledge and the situations that produced it as integers of a new global culture.

In spite of what has been misinterpreted as his nativism (especially during his “break” with English), Ngugi has never been comfortable with the role of the native informant. Indeed, his literary oeuvre is remarkable for its impatience with colonial and postcolonial theories of Africans and romantic attempts to recuperate an essential and unanimous African culture. Given his uneasiness with nativism, then, it should not come as a surprise to his readers that Ngugi's response to the problem I sketched above—what does it mean to be an African intellectual in the West?—has been to fall back on the language of globalization. This language of globalization begins in the revised edition of Writers in Politics and becomes full blown in Penpoints. In the latter book, as I will argue below, the language of globalization can be read as the mask for a universalistic discourse without precedent in Ngugi's critical work.

Reading Ngugi's movement from the particularism that defined the first edition of Writers in Politics to the universalism of the revised edition is an intriguing process—it reflects the history of African literature and theory from its high nationalist period in the 1960s to the troubled search for a home in the West whose history and ideologies it sought to negate. More specifically, the most important revisions in Writers in Politics, revisions that are more apparent in the added and expanded essays than the expurgated ones, reflect Ngugi's own awareness of how the original cultural project of Writers in Politics has been superseded by global events (such as the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the triumph of capitalism) and his own changed position vis-à-vis his readership. Ngugi retains the original title of the book because his concerns still revolve around the relationship between literature and politics, but he adds an important subtitle: “A re-engagement with issues of literature and society.” What does it mean to re-engage with issues that the author had once considered settled?

There is no doubt that Ngugi conceives “re-engagement” as simultaneously a gesture of retour—the return to a previously-evacuated discursive site—and a rethinking of this locality as the mark of a break with the original. Re-engagement is here posited as both a semantic sign of difference and repetition; under its umbrella, continuity is affirmed even when the evidence points to theoretical and historical discontinuity. Indeed, Ngugi's desire to present his new project as a continuity of the old one is often in conflict with the desire for theoretical rupture demanded by his new location within the American academy. In constructing his revisions around identical terms as the ones in the original text—writers, politics, literature, and society—Ngugi creates the impression that he is still functioning within the same ideological structure. A closer examination of his critical grammar, however, foregrounds his movement from the ideologies of the Fourth International so apparent in the first edition Writers in Politics to the new (post) modern language of globalization.

Whereas the original edition had emphasized workers' solidarity and resistance against imperialism—then defined in its Leninist terms as the highest stage of capitalism—the new edition speaks a language familiar to the proponents of multiculturalism, including the politics of the canon, education and identity, the discourse of human rights, and the primacy of culture in the new world order. And while many of the revisions in the new edition are superficial (reflected more in the new titles and subtitles of the essays rather than in their substantive character), they are clearly intended to have a different readerly or performative effect. In these new titles and subtitles, we see an African author struggling to drag his aesthetic claims into a sometimes recalcitrant Western Lebenswelt.

It is not hard to find instances of Ngugi's move from the Fourth International to multiculturalism. In “Repression in North Korea,” an essay expurgated from the revised edition of Writers in Politics, Ngugi's ideological sympathies were clearly with the international socialist movement; his language invoked familiar images of class struggle against a totalized imperial center led by the United States. Writing specifically about the repression of writers in South Korea, Ngugi's goal in this essay was to draw parallels between the common experiences of victims of tyranny under the shadow of international capital. The assumed similitude between the oppression of intellectuals in Korea and Kenya was predicated on the international nature of capitalism and local resistance toward it; oppressed peoples could only institute new cultural formations in a world liberated from the tyrannical of capital. Separated in time and space, Korea and Kenya were brought together by the grand narrative of capital; the solidarity of cultural workers in these countries was ensured by their continuous struggle against the demon of capitalism.

In the new edition of Writers in Politics, in a replacement essay aptly called “Culture in Crisis: Problems of Creativity and the New World Order,” international capital no longer seems to determine cultural production—and the question of human rights—in the same uniform and hegemonic way. Deprived of its overdetermining force, capital is no longer a singular force cutting across communities and cultures, but an effect of the multiple configuration of power relations—on both a local and global scale—that followed the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Global culture, Ngugi seems to suggest, is produced in a network of relations in which neither the logic of capital, nor the dream of socialism, is a major or decisive force. While Ngugi is still concerned with problems of domination and resistance, the new essay clearly seeks to shun ideology altogether; evacuated from the scene of analysis, the grammar of the Fourth International has been replaced by the idiom of North American multiculturalism with its easily consumable notions of identity and alterity.

To be fair to him, Ngugi's concern with the organization of literary knowledge in a situation of domination predates the American debate on the literary canon. Indeed, it is in his engagement with issues of curriculum and pedagogy that he can claim a fundamental continuity between what one may call his Nairobi and New York projects as they are mapped out in Writers in Politics. Ngugi makes minor revisions in the essays devoted to the teaching of literature, but in rereading these essays, I am easily convinced by his claim that the issues that preoccupied him in Kenya in the 1970s contain useful lessons for American institutions going through a similar period of self-questioning and reform. But the continuity these essays presuppose also calls attention to the problems of cultural translation that become an issue when one tries to apply reflections from one situation to another, especially within the uneven epistemological structures that govern the relations between the metropolitan centers and its margins. Simply put, the only way Ngugi can make the lessons learnt in Nairobi applicable—or even intelligible—to American institutions of knowledge is by invoking a language of universality which is at times at odds with his commitment to local knowledge.

Two kinds of revisions are particularly germane here. First of all, as I have already noted, even when the substance of the work remains the same, the second edition has new titles that carefully foreground the universality that makes them attractive to Western readers. This universality is embedded in what I have already called the idiom of multiculturalism. The second kind of revision can be founded in what appears to be Ngugi's attempt to create a teleology for his earlier works—to identify their concerns, in a distant time and place, as inherently connected to the moment of revision denoted by the new edition of Writers in Politics. This second mode of revision appears in the essay on J. M. Kariuki mentioned earlier and in an expanded article on the launching of Petals of Blood. If in the original edition Ngugi had sought to use the body of Kariuki as a conduit through which national rage could be channeled into productive knowledge—that is, as an allegorical commentary on the failure of the postcolonial state in Kenya—the new edition recuperates the dead politician as a universal hero. Kariuki is now introduced to Western readers as “a symbol of resistance,” the figure who connects “the colonial and the post-colonial”; Mau Mau Detainee is defined retrospectively as a part of a growing literature of imprisonment in the world and the “founding text of Kenya's prison literature” (110). In this invocation of the familiar idiom of postcoloniality, Ngugi acquaints his Western readers with what might otherwise be an obscure Kenyan event.

The essay on the launching of Petals of Blood is rewritten in a similar vein. In the original edition, this essay was a brief reflection on the painful process of writing a novel about underdevelopment; it was intended to be a statement of acknowledgment to the people who had been crucial in Ngugi's constitution as a writer—his mother and his teachers. In the revised edition, the autobiographical element of the essay still remains, but the expanded essay is presented to us as a testament to something larger than the travail of writing a major novel—it becomes one of Ngugi's most powerful reflections on what it means to be a writer in a postcolonial state. If, in the original essay, the subjective act of writing was seen as perfunctory, a minor aspect of the author's conception of literature as “a reflection of the material reality under which we live” (96), in the revised edition, Ngugi's retrospective reflection on the launching of his signature work is represented as nothing less than his attempt to account for his own production as a colonial and postcolonial subject. This is now an essay on the novelist's subjective quest for a room of his own in the global economy of culture, a place in the house that “capitalist fundamentalism” built (93). What we hear now is an African writer also talking about himself to a cosmopolitan audience that assumes the centrality of subjectivity in the production of literature.

Where do Ngugi's Clarendon lectures fit in these acts of revision, in these movements from local sites of production to a Western cosmopolitanism that conceals its privileges under the guise of global culture? On the surface, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams would appear to be the continuation of one of Ngugi's oldest cultural projects—his attempt to understand the relationship between the artist and the state in Africa. But the choice of subjects here, especially the emphasis on the relationship between art and power, represents both continuity and discontinuity in Ngugi's critical practice. The continuity is apparent in Ngugi's concern with the institution of art, most specifically literature and performance, in a context dominated by questions of power. It is not hard to understand why the question of power has been so central to Ngugi's critical discourse: he came of age under the domination of the colonial state in Kenya at one of its most violent phases, the state of emergency in the 1950s; he matured as a writer in that unfortunate phase in African history when the liberal postcolonial state adopted the oppressive mechanisms of its colonial predecessor.

But beneath the author's relentless concern with how power affects artistic production, there is a less apparent mode of discontinuity in his sociology of literature. This discontinuity is to be found in a dual shift: first, there is a shift in the locus of writing, more specifically a move from the novel to performance as genres of cultural criticism; second, there is a shift from the notion of society, a concept that had dominated Ngugi's earlier works, to the social and analytical category of the state.

Of these two shifts, the first one is the easiest to explain. After his experiment at Kamĩrĩĩthu—a project that involved, it must be emphasized, a rethinking of the place of the audience in the making of drama—Ngugi seems to have recognized the power of performance as a force of social change. Among the many things Ngugi discovered at Kamĩrĩĩthu, as he constantly reminds his readers throughout Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, was that the site of performance represented a unique example of how practitioners of the theater could break down the barrier between producers of art and its recipients, between the act of power and its subversion. His basic claim, then, is that when it is opened up to the world outside its own spatial confines, theater can turn audiences into active social agents. And it is because it recognized the subversive potential of the performative space, Ngugi argues, that the state had historically sought to either control or destroy performance. This was the most important lesson learnt at Kamĩrĩĩthu and Ngugi is determined to spread the message even further. Although he continues to define himself as a novelist, it is apparent that Ngugi is no longer content with forms of art that are restricted to individual and privileged bourgeois readers. This shift from the scriptural economy to orality is already apparent in the performative dimension of Matigari; it also explains Ngugi's serious investment in theater and cinema during the early days of his exile.

The question of Ngugi's shift from the theoretical problem of society in literature to the conceptual category of the state is far more complex. It is made much more complicated by a set of closely related factors: As an African intellectual in Europe or North America, Ngugi's works are no longer overdetermined by the postcolonial state. In exile, the questions that had made the state the overwhelming presence in the production of Ngugi's art while he was living in Africa—censorship, imprisonment, and the culture of silence—are, ironically, no longer important or urgent. At the same time, however, the notion of society—and social relationships—that Ngugi had deployed in his earlier essays seemed to have been over-taken by historical events—the end of the cold war and the triumph of capitalism. Remember, after all, that in his early essays, Ngugi's understanding of society as a social and analytical category had been intimately connected to Marxist ideology and a socialist aesthetic. In Ngugi's Marxist essays, for example, social relationships are conceived, inherently, as the product of the relationship between “men” and their productive forces; the category of society is mediated by the notion of class struggle; its history is defined by a teleology that leads from primitive production, through the crisis of capitalism, toward a classless society. This narrative, borrowed from Marx's Grundrisse and the German Ideology, is the engine driving the essays and fiction Ngugi produced in the 1970s. Similarly, the socialist aesthetic in these works was premised on a very specific understanding of the relation between society and the subject and form of literature.²

Except for those instances when Ngugi provided his readers with trenchant critiques of specific postcolonial regimes and their unsavory practices, the Marxist essays did not seem to be interested in the state as a theoretical category. This disinterest in the problematic of the state was itself a direct product of the Marxist theory that Ngugi had inherited, albeit indirectly, from Hegel and Lenin. Marxism's residual Hegelianism, for example, enabled it to conceive the state, in its idealized and abstract form, as a guarantor of rights. This investment in the role of the state as a agent of freedom was also apparent in the Leninist belief that the revolutionary state had a crucial role to play in the construction of socialist society (the idea of revolution was, after all, dependent on the ability of radical forces to control the state apparatus). Against this background, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams provides a startling shift in Ngugi's theoretical concerns even when it seems to rehearse familiar positions.

None of these concerns is more pressing and troublesome than Ngugi's totalized conception of the state as the enemy of art, his valorization of performance as a genre that is inherently revolutionary, and the ultimate disappearance of society as a theoretical category in his critical thought. Clearly, the power of Ngugi's thesis in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams—that art consolidates its identity and function in opposition to “the state's terror and paranoia”—depends on his conception of the totalized identity of the state and its irrationalism (2). Ngugi's basis premise is that the state has a universal history, character, and function. Indeed, in order to make the claim that art acquires its political identity as an oppositional force in the human community, it seems almost imperative for the critic to build his case on examples that take the universality of his objects of analysis (the state and art) for granted. Thus, lessons drawn from Gikuyu oral culture are brought into direct comparison with stories in the Old Testament, which intersect with dialogues from Plato's Republic, which are in turn drawn into a dialogical relationship with more recent victims of postcolonial terror such as Nawal el Sa'adawi. There is something attractive in this method of analysis: Ngugi reads local cultures for their global implications; he analyzes specific instances of cultural production (such as the struggle for control of the national theater in Kenya) for their global meaning. In addition, his delineation of the relationship between art and the state is notable for its clarity of expression and vision, its cognizance of how local and global knowledge provide similar points of reflection.

At the same time, however, Ngugi's argument—his primary claim that art is conceptualized in opposition to state power—is disappointing in its refusal, or inability, to confront its own contradictions and to account for its exclusions. Consider, for example, Ngugi's premise that art has a “godlike” aspect reflected in the fact that it is celebrated by different cultures around the world as a mode of creation (10-12). Ngugi begins by reading what appears to be the worship of art and the artist in “traditional” society as the basis of its oppositional beginnings, then he moves on quickly to contrast the diachronic nature of art with what he sees as the synchronizing function of the state. Ngugi's broad and consistent claim is that “a state, any state, is conservative by its very nature as a state” (13). Indeed, the opposition between a conservative and destructive state and a radical and redemptive aesthetic is the conceptual cornerstone of Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams:

It would seem to me, taking all the four aspects of art and their opposites in the state into account, that the state, when functioning to its logical conclusion as the state, and art functioning as art are antagonistic. They are continuously at war. The state in a class society is an instrument of control in the hands of whatever is the dominant social force. Art, on the other hand, in its beginnings was always an ally of the human search for freedom from hostile nature and nurture.

(28)

But this kind of claim only invites more vexed questions: Can the state ever be an agent of social good, as both Liberals and Marxists have argued for almost two centuries, or is it inherently evil? Is the power and function of art ensured by its inherently redemptive quality, or is the association between the work of art and freedom adscititious? And if we are to take the polarization between art and the state seriously, what are we to make of the argument, often made in regard to the cultural institutions of European fascism, that theories of the aesthetic had a logical connection to the cultural politics of the fascist state (see Jay). Ngugi might argue, in response to the last question, that what was happening in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy was an instance of the state misusing art for its destructive ends. Still, it is hard to dismiss the argument that certain ideologies of art are inherently connected to fascist ideology, or to argue that the conservatism of the state is inherent in its conceptualization rather than structure.

Similar problems are discernible in Ngugi's exploration of what he calls the “Socratic” aspect of art: “Art has more questions than it has answers. Art starts with a position of not knowing and it seeks to know” (15). The problem here is not so much the claim that art has an interrogative and, by extension, epistemological function; rather, in his generalized reading of the kinds of question art raises, questions he traces all the way from Plato to Nietzsche, Ngugi avoids the more difficult problem in this discourse: what are the conditions in which certain questions are raised and not others? Plato's Socrates is not merely interested in raising questions; he is involved in a philosophical project whose goal is to secure the idealism of the state, or the authority of the moral order, as an ideal order that predates representation (mimesis). As is well known, Plato banishes art from the ideal Republic because it promotes a mode of knowledge that contravenes the idealism of the moral order, an order that is guaranteed by the state. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the failure of art is implicit in its classical association with idealism; he asks questions whose goal is to break down the logic of art, or rather its association with rationality. If Plato sees art as dangerous because it has no capacity for truth, Nietzsche attacks art for being imprisoned in rationalism.³ The two philosophers pose their questions about art in specific circumstances in the history of “Western” thought—Plato at the infancy of the state and the inaugural moment of poetic reflection; Nietzsche at what has come to be construed as the end of both processes.

Do Old Testament and Gikuyu sages pose the same question in similar ways in different circumstances? Is the colonial and postcolonial state in Africa identical to Socrates's Athenian state? The problem with the theory of art in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams is not that Ngugi fails to provide the kind of qualifiers that his assertions seem to demand. Indeed, he is fully aware of “the complexities of history and social formations” that make it impossible for us to posit the function of either art or the state as “logical absolutes” (28). The problem is much more elementary—the positing of art and state as conceptual and moral absolutes posited in opposition to one another.

The arguments presented in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams are much successful when Ngugi turns to the specific relation between power and the politics of performance (ch. 2); language, democracy, and globalization (ch. 3); and the challenge of orality to theories of art built on the unquestioned primacy of writing (ch. 4). What is impressive about these chapters is not their power of critique or theoretical reflection, but Ngugi's ability to link his own observations and experiences as a practitioner of the theater arts to some of the issues that have come to dominate debates about performance. In discussing the problem of space in the theater, for example, Ngugi restates, or slightly revises, the dominant view in the field of performance studies that the power of the theatrical space depends on its openness and/or enclosure; but he then moves on to reflect on his own encounters with the politics of performance in Kenya which complicate some of the established positions on spatiality in the theater.

Given his past experiences with the state, Ngugi is attuned to the real, as opposed to the theoretical, questions that arise when the artist uses space to question the organization of power and political practices. Thus, he draws on his experiences at both the National Theater in Kenya and Kamĩrĩĩthu, to present a series of arguments that are as much about space as they are about imprisoned bodies. Two important observations emerge out of this discussion. First, in reflecting on the nature of imprisonment in Africa, Ngugi recognizes and calls attention to the role of prison as “the enclosure in which the state organizes the use of space and time in such a way as to achieve what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies’ and hence docile minds” (58). Secondly, he notes that the openness of the performance space terrifies “those in possession of repressive power” (63) in very concrete terms. When the Kenyan government set out to destroy the Kamĩrĩĩthu theater in 1982, Ngugi notes, it had already identified the physical space of performance as the bearer of political meanings that couldn't be contained within the space of the stage.

But how exactly does the space of performance function as a site of opposition to political power? Ngugi is sensitive to the different ways in which power engages with the open space and he presents some compelling examples from colonial and postcolonial Africa. The most revealing of these examples are two in which he was personally involved: the dispute surrounding the production of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi at the National Theater in Nairobi in 1976 and the banning of the production of I Will Marry When I Want in 1977. In the former instance, he recalls, the regime was unhappy with the ideological message of The Trial, a work that challenged the legitimacy of the postcolonial state by calling attention to its decidedly colonial foundations; but the state did not consider this threat strong enough to ban the production of the play or to imprison its author. In contrast, I Will Marry When I Want, a work that bore the same ideological message and structure as The Trial, was considered such a threat to the national security interest that it was banned after only a few months of performance and its author was subsequently imprisoned and exiled. How do we explain these divergent reactions by state power to the work of art? Ngugi explains the difference in spatial terms: produced at the National Theater in Nairobi, The Trial was a subversive play, but it was being performed within the space authorized by the Kenyan state and bourgeois culture; in contrast, the space at Kamĩrĩĩthu was constructed in opposition to the authorized institutions of the theater. Ngugi's emphatic claim is that the “open space among the people is the most dangerous area because the most vital” (68).

But in this conclusion—as in the spatial terms that precede it—we can detect what I consider to be the weakness of the grammar of performance studies that Ngugi adopts in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams. Surely the issue here goes beyond the nature of the space of performance. What is at stake, also, is a complex network of political interests—and paranoia—which the space of performance foregrounds. In the case of Kamĩrĩĩthu, for example, the Kenyan state was involved in a larger political drama than the one contained in the spaces of performance. It was involved in a political drama about the practice of power itself, namely the postcolonial Kenyan state's growing insecurity in the late 1970s over the question of the Kenyatta succession. It was involved in a struggle over radical politics (Marxism was acceptable so long as it was confined to bourgeois institutions such as the National Theater and the university). In addition, the Kenya state couldn't conceive of a play in an African language outside its own paranoia about class and ethnicity: the Kenyatta government was frightened by the possibility of an alliance between a radicalized intelligentsia and a disgruntled peasantry; the Moi regime lived in fear of a resurgency of Gikuyu nationalism, which had often used culture as its most powerful mode of insurgency. What made one performance space more open than the other had to do with a configuration of all these forces and the desires of the real and projected audience.

But knowing that the author is perhaps one of the best students of cultural politics in Africa, one cannot help wondering why the grammar of performance seems to take precedence over culture and politics, what the earlier Ngugi would consider to be the ideological imperative. Is there a paradigmatic shift here? If so how can we explain this shift? One could try and explain Ngugi's move away from ideology in terms of his location within an America institution in which the language of disciplines seems to be more important or intelligible than Ideologiekritik. In this case, one could argue that Ngugi is trying to represent African cultural practices in the familiar language of performance criticism. Alternatively, one could argue that Ngugi's affinity for the universal language of space emerges from the exiled artist's alienation from “the space which nourishes his imagination,” an alienation which he tries to overcome by occupying “the global space” (61-62).

The centering of global space in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams is an important and welcome development in Ngugi's cultural criticism. But if some readers look at this development with some trepidation, it is because they are aware of the simple fact that Ngugi's best fictional work was nourished by his dynamic relationship to local sources, his relationship with the East African landscape, and his compelling argument that art in Africa had to function as an instrument of Ideologiekritik if it was to live up to its historical mission and the expectations of its audience. What is going to nourish Ngugi's imagination in exile? And whatever happened to the grammar of Marxism and the project of socialism that dominated his critical writings throughout the 1970s? If there is one thing I miss in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, it is Ngugi's ruminations on the nature of art and society as defined by the Marxist aesthetic.

I miss this dimension for both personal and intellectual reasons: for those of us who were students at the University of Nairobi in the late 1970s, Ngugi's Marxism provided an indispensable language for understanding the destructive politics of the postcolonial state and what Frantz Fanon called the “pitfalls of national consciousness” (148-205). Ngugi's uncompromising political stance emboldened my generation in its demands for democratic rights and social justice in the postcolony. For this, countless numbers of Ngugi's former students and associates paid a heavy price in the dark days after his exile in 1982. This was a time when any association with one of his political and cultural projects was construed to be Marxist, hence subversive and undesirable. Condemned as Marxists at the University of Nairobi, these students were to undertake their “postgraduate studies” at maximum security prisons—Kamiti, Naivasha, Kisumu, and Shimo la Tewa—that had been made infamous by the colonial government and had now been resurrected by the Kenyan state as re-education camps for its perceived political enemies. Ngugi is aware of this history of postcolonial terror in Kenya. Indeed, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams is dedicated to the memory of Karimi Nduthu, an uncompromising graduate of the state prison system in Kenya and one of the most recent victims of postcolonial terror. Still, many of Ngugi's former students and associates await his reflections on the future of Marxism and socialism after the end of the cold war.

Notes

1. The concepts of lifeworld and public sphere used here are borrowed from the works of Jïürgen Habermas, most notably, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

2. In the key essays collected in the first edition of Writers in Politics, Ngugi's adoption of a fairly traditional Marxist aesthetic is not in doubt. The framework for this aesthetic is laid out in “Literature and Society,” the first essay in the collection.

3. Plato's famous rejection of the ethical claims of art can be found in Book 10 of The Republic; his critique of representation is in Ion. Nietzsche's most famous dissociation of art and rationality is in The Birth of Tragedy. For excellent selections from these works, see David Richter, The Critical Tradition.

Parts of this review essay are excerpted from my recently completed book—Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000—and are used with permission from Cambridge University Press.

Works Cited

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Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1968.

Gikandi, Simon. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

———. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Habermas, Jïürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.

———. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990.

Jay, Martin. “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology; or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?” Cultural Critique (1992): 41-61.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature and Politics. London: Heinemann, 1972; Westport: Lawrence and Hill, 1973; rpt. 1983.

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———. Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey, 1986.

———. “Kĩĩingeretha: Ruthiomi rwa Thĩ Yoothe? Kaba Gĩtwaĩri (sic)” (“English as a Global Language? Perhaps Swahili”). Yale Journal of Criticism 5.1 (1991): 269-94.

———. Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey, 1993.

———. Mũtiiri: Njaranda ya Miikarĩre, Vol. 1. Newark: Mutiiri Abirika, 1994.

———. Writers in Politics: A Re-engagement with Issues of Literature and Society. Revised and enlarged edition, London: James Currey, 1997.

———. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, Oxford: Clarendon. 1998.