Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 2009 collection of essays Something Torn and New is subtitled “An African Renaissance,” and the last seven years have witnessed something of a “Ngũgĩ renaissance” with the publication of the longest, most ambitious novel of his career, two volumes of memoirs, and the latest magisterial theoretical work, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Based on Ngũgĩ’s Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory given in May 2010, Globalectics advances a new conception of ethics/aesthetics, one related to Spivak’s notion of the “planetary” in Death of a Discipline, which Ngũgĩ briefly cites (57), and to Glissant’s “poetics of relation.” It is the remarkable work of a diasporic Pan-African intellectual nearing his eighth decade, signaling Ngũgĩ’s importance as a major postcolonial theorist and not merely a novelist or dramatist who happens to “do theory,” or as a critic whose essays simply explain his creative work. Globalectics draws on some of his well-established and often repeated concerns while advancing into new domains. It is clearly designed to take the “global” back from globalization.

Ngũgĩ defines globalectics as the acceptance of “wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world” (8). It articulates “a web of connections of mutual dependence” between “nature, nurture, supernatural, and supernurtural” (75, 77). Globalectics’s account of global ethics and world literary aesthetics is informed by Goethe’s transnationalism and Marx’s cosmopolitanism, and it aspires to reintegrate a world disunited by economic, cultural, and political exploitation. It situates the postcolonial project in its historical moment, heeds many of the term’s often-rehearsed limitations, and attempts to develop it into a broader, more inclusive, more worldly approach that shape-shifts and synthesizes global cultural forms and flows. In this latter respect, the globalectic operates as a critique of the postcolonial despite the postcolonial’s apparent plurality and worldiness. Ngũgĩ links globalectics to a democratization of old linguistic hierarchies—themselves extrapolated from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic—relating globalectics to his now-famous memo that launched a revolution.

This memo, issued at the University of Nairobi in 1968 and reprinted in Ngũgĩ’s first essay collection, Homecoming, called for the abolition of the English department and its replacement with a department of literature. Cowritten with Henry Owuor Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong, it was a blow against “intellectual self-enclosure” in national, cultural, generic, and linguistic silos (42). It sought a reimagining of cultural centers and margins as well as an openness to the multidisciplinary, “interlinked nature of art forms in the traditional practice” (73), including the performative interaction of literature, orature, music, drama, and “cyborature” (85). Reflecting on this historical moment after nearly fifty years, Ngũgĩ sees its sweeping implications, including its influence on the birth of a discipline, postcolonial studies.

For Ngũgĩ, the revolutionary movement in the postcolonial university, although focused on curricular reform and even institutional restructuring, enabled the emergence of a new type of knowledge worker: the postcolonial artist intellectual who is also a creative critic. Globalectics’s final chapter examines scenes in Out of Africa, Tristes Tropiques, and Robinson Crusoe, considering how they exclude the colonial or othered subject from history. Ngũgĩ performs a close reading of the type he endorsed earlier in the volume, though he cautions about the dangers of overreliance on formalism. His method marries Leavis with Kettle, though also adding Marx, Césaire, and Derrida.

A shift in focus from Africa’s “holocaust” to Africa’s “renaissance” is performed in both Globalectics and Something Torn and New (Something 59). Invoking the prophetic role of the griot and the words of Marx and Martin Carter, Ngũgĩ strives to dream the future into being while re-membering or reassembling the broken body of the past. This focus on memory recalls the preoccupation in much of Ngũgĩ’s work with giving voice to Kenya’s anticolonial struggle, as recently acknowledged in Caroline Elkins’s account of “Britain’s gulag” (374–375). Elkins’s, David Anderson’s, and Ian Cobain’s historical work has drawn attention to the operations of terror in colonial Kenya that have recently been voiced and won some redress in British courts. Ngũgĩ calls for remembrance, a type of global mourning, for all of the victims of colonialism and slavery, and Globalectics points to a more hopeful future.