Tales from the corpolony: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s wizard of the crow and the dictator-novel in the time of transition

This article reads Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow as both a dictator-novel and a critical use of the genre to analyze the larger-scale global political transformations (so-called “transitions”) that followed the end of the Cold War. Beyond its critique of dictators and dictatorship on the African continent, Wizard of the Crow turns attention to nascent networks of opposition to neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. This constitutes the emergent Global South consciousness of Ngũgĩ’s dictator-novel, which requires a reexamination of the contours of the genre in and for the twenty-first century.