| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Bahadur Tejani's Day After Tomorrow reads most easily as a highly schematic narrative about race relations in East Africa. The novel runs on a heady rhetorical mix of Negritude and D.H. Lawrence, offering a sexually and mythically charged, biologically inexorable, historically reductive African pastoral as a vision for Uganda's national future and a broader East African social sensibility. Against this first impression, this paper works towards a less unrelenting reading of the novel. This is achieved by being more attentive to the contradictions within the text, particularly the tension between its allegorical and realist impulses. Investigating its political and aesthetic influences and choices, placing it in the context of dominant literary trends and racial discourses of East Africa of the 1960s-1970s, and pitting it against postcolonial nation discourse theory, this reading strives to re-value the terms of good faith - the fervent sense of both transgression and alignment - with which this first novel of the South Asian East African Diaspora was offered to its local constituency.
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