Ways of becoming: postcolonial literature and the limits of mimicry and hybridity

This paper questions the ways in which language education could contribute to democratic cultural spaces and configurations through the use of purposefully selected literary texts. I argue that there is something disturbingly worrisome in the incompleteness and mimicry of the postcolnial state's language and literature curriculum that uncannily resembles the class, hierarchy and cultural practices of the colonial architecture. in that respect, identities and ruptures of colonial whose archive was apparently destabilised and displaced by an alternative autonomy in the apparatus of the postcolonial state seem to be ragaining a new inauguration in the literature and language curricula in Africa without the confrontational arsenal. Beauty, ugliness, democracy, dictatorship, corruption, identity, discourse, documentation, exaltation, or even just exposing the postcolonial stink does indeed benefit humanity. But when climate change has become an alarmingly global agenda, and millions of post-war and postcolnial citizens are displaced by war and have become unwelcome sojourners in most places, and postcolnial African leaders increasingly justify abusive power, it becomes easy to question the value of telling stories or building sculpture. After all, what does a literary text and a painting give to the populace? How can a writer prescribed in the literature curriculum take on a despotic president? This paper takes on the task, highlighting and negotiating the strategic value of literary and cultural texts in the tasks of circulating democracy and augmenting constructs of national identities. Indeed, both essentialist and pluralist identities have limitations, and it is within the ambit of such limitations that this paper proposes ways of becoming that could be negotiated through postcolonial literature and language studies in the curriculum.