Abstract: My talk, “Redeeming Failed States: Allegory and the Literary Imagination,” begins by returning to the concluding section of Marx’s Capital in order to uncover two issues relevant to thinking post-coloniality: namely, difference and origin. I make the case that “failed states” are, at a spatial level, the result of a constitutive superfluity that inheres to capital’s production and preservation of difference. I will then suggest that Nuruddin Farah’s 1986 novel, Maps, presents a novelisation of the failed-state. I argue that even while unwaveringly depicting the social strife and disrepair afflicting Somalia, however, the text’s allegorical structure of constantly returning to its own origins implicitly repudiates UN-style assessments or, indeed, readings of the country in the presentist terms of a “failed state.”
Biographical note: Ashwin Bajaj is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He specializes in postcolonial and decolonial literatures, novel theory, and critical theory. His work has appeared in NOVEL and Studies in the Novel and is forthcoming in Postmodern Culture.