Decolonizing allegory and anti-imperialist critique in the longue durée of extractivism

Abstract

A re-thinking of the critical vocation of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is long overdue. The British Commonwealth of Nations that was first established in 1949 has continued to provide a neo-colonial framework for Britain and its former dominions (particularly Australia and Canada) to extract raw materials, capital, and labour from former British colonies and commodity frontiers within settler colonies. For this reason, the British Commonwealth of Nations may be understood as a zombie-like system of extractivism, in which a moribund imperial power stumbles on by draining the postcolonial world of its lifeblood. Against the obfuscation of this system by the term “Commonwealth literature”, I suggest that one of the critical tasks of anti-imperialist critique in future issues of Literature, Critique, and Empire Today is to examine how a dynamic relationship between allegory and counter-allegory in decolonial world literatures works to foreground and contest the neo-colonial dynamics of extractivism, in order to imagine the conditions of possibility for bringing about the abolition of that system. At the core of the article is a consideration of how allegory and counter-allegory form part of the intricate allegorical machinery of two rather different cultural texts: M. NourbeSe Philip’s experimental poem Zong! (2008) and William Kentridge’s animated film Mine (1991). By giving form and meaning to the history and legacy of anti-systemic movements against racial extractivism, decolonizing allegories such as Zong! and Mine also demand a rethinking of predominant materialist approaches to modern allegory.