Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

To deepen the application of the New Economic Criticism in analysis of literary texts, there is need to expand its scope to cover postcolonial economic formulations. This paper presents a renewed reading of power relations in terms of textual engagements that instead underpin money relations in postcolonial criticism. It shows how narrative performance unfolds postcolonial political economy through the monetization of texts following Marc Shell’s understanding that money is an internal participant in the logical organisation of language. If certain essentials in human behaviour transcends historical and cultural differences (F. Rossi-Landi), it is because a formalist economic reading of a text as a locus of exchanges and transactions could offer critical insights into the extent to which money as a store of wealth, circulating medium and measure of values (Jean-joseph Goux) prefigures and conditions global economic power relations, and hence postcolonial economies. Reading, therefore, connects the internal economies of texts to their economic content and the contexts within which they reside. Using Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Niyi Osundare’s Songs of the Marketplace, I examine how the collapse of imperialism and the world’s growing economic and political interconnectedness results in a near-complete erosion of notions of national and ethnic exclusivity in the Caribbean, and dearth of good governance in Africa. While neo-hybrid economic identity in the Caribbean enables seamless cultural transition, the African non-trust economy destabilises national development. These analytical trajectories are established following textual economies—a system of tropes and fictions about value, money and exchange in literary discourses.