Author: Abdul-Karim Kamara (University of The Gambia, The Gambia)
Abstract
Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Ashis Nandy, and many more postcolonial scholars use the term ‘subaltern’ to refer to the peoples of formerly colonized spaces: Africa, the Americas, and Asia, which can perhaps be subsumed under the rubric 'subaltern triangle'. Redemptive literary production in the said triangle has had the same character and content; the escribidores (writers) and letrados (intellectuals) of this subaltern triangle share the same concern: literature for nation-building and prosperity. Among other governance issues, the organic writers of the triangle engage the conquistadors and their successors in a dialogue for movement to a third locus of political independence, economic prosperity, and human dignity.
This paper focuses on the efforts deployed by the organic “letrados” of the African angle to call the various leaderships to order so that their activities will fall in line with the all-important business of mitigating poverty in this angle of the subaltern triangle. Agency (a postcolonial theoretical trapping), particularly as it is interpreted by Homi K Bhabha and Wole Soyinka, is adopted as the central scaffold to underpin textual analysis. It concludes that if people of letters go organic and join the uncredentialized social media intellectuals in denouncing bad behaviour by the leadership, the African angle of the subaltern triangle might not be transformed into a utopia, but at least life in it will be worth living.
Keywords: Agency, Challengers, Organic intellectualism, Credentialized and uncredentialized intellectuals, and Subaltern
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