Redefining Transnational Literature after the Ontological Turn in the Global South Decoloniality: African Perspective

Abstract

Contemporary twenty-first century literary and cultural studies are turning to ontology for both content and form. This multidisciplinary theoretical framework examines the nexus between the ontological turn in cultural anthropology, and transnational literary studies, with a keen focus on the African perspective. The analysis has an acute interest in epistemic violence and epistemicides in the decoloniality discourse anchored in a sociological contextualization of the ontological turn. Additionally, it proposes a change in basic assumptions regarding the prevailing transnational global ontology, as parts of the broader effort to recover alternative ontologies of inhabiting and conceptualizing the world. By alternative ontologies I mean worldviews in which the human, non-human, ancestral, and spiritual worlds are entangled, and shape both experience itself and the representation of experience. Part one outlines how alternative modes of being and knowing can emerge in narrative form. Second part address imperialism and coloniality epistemic violence against the ontology of the Global South. Part three focuses on the epistemic reawakening of the Global South’s ontology via postcolonial criticism alongside decoloniality. Employing both linear and spiral modes of qualitative data exposition, the framework will contribute to a transnational interpretation of African, and African diasporic literary texts, beyond the postcolonial perspective that they have potently been subjected.