Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Armah's _Two Thousand Seasons_ as a neo-slave narrative that refuses forced migration at the point of origin and imagines return or homecoming as a strategy for re-asserting African sovereignty in an age of neoliberal economics and necropolitics.

Paper long abstract:

Armah's 1973 novel features a unique first-person plural voice that narrates from beginning to end. Set in an unnamed West African society where the so-called "people of the way" (206) have been infiltrated first by Islamic "predators" (203) and more recently by white "destroyers" from the Christian west (203), _Two Thousand Seasons_ charts an epic tale of collective decay and possible regeneration. While the people have departed from the collaborative, creative values of the way, and thereby left themselves open to a long period of domination and enslavement (the two thousand seasons of the title), the narrative voice in the novel issues a call for remembrance of the way and resistance to the forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade. My paper will explore the unique identity form projected by the collective narrator, and attempt to shed light on how Armah links cultural creativity with the political struggle to reclaim sovereignty in the wake of violent waves of imperialism and human trafficking. Functioning like a speculative neo-slave narrative, Armah's analysis of humans in relation to nature, commodities, and each other make this text urgently relevant in the present day. Along with my examination of the narrative voice, I will also draw on recent theories of necropolitics by Achille Mbembe and sovereignty by Giorgio Agamben to suggest why and how Armah's novel remains important for imagining and strategically reclaiming popular sovereignty over spaces and lives devastated by the continuing threat of a global neoliberal political economy.