Africa's cultural unconscious in the making of modern culture : revisiting the trope of return in African literature

Abstract

The article argues that the uneasiness with Africa’s place in the narrative of modernity should be taken seriously because it is tied to the discourses of Western modernity, which has always worked to project the African subject as its other. It makes the argument that in spite of all these prejudices, Africa remains securely embedded in the discourses as a repressed ulterior and a point of return for Africans on the continent as well as those in the diaspora. It concludes that the lingering presence of cultural unconscious found in a number of literary texts examined in the article, is a measure of those popular cultural processes that have resisted capitalist rationalization and indeed, a pointer to the incompleteness of modernity in Africa.