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Contribution short abstract

Using Quayson’s notion of Interdiscursivity, the paper aims to analyse how Cliff’s Abeng and Obioma’s The Fishermen, by focalisinng indigenous resources, construct alternative narratives to resist dominant developmental frameworks and engender authentic sustainable development.

Contribution long abstract

The dominance of elite-established and formal developmental frameworks, systems and structures within Global South societies like Nigeria and Jamaica is progressively coming under intense scrutiny. This is especially with the decoloniality project and its advocacy for the centering of the largely underrepresented indigenous knowledges. By resisting dominant blueprints, indigenous groups are practically reconceptualizing and reframing their identity, history, future, and purpose. Consequently, alternative routes towards the type of sustainable development that rehumanizes, and engenders justice and systemic balance, are being consciously constructed. The observed development is perhaps more lucidly articulated in Literature. For instance, Michelle Cliff and Chigozie Obioma, transform the novels Abeng and The Fishermen into intellectual territories of resistance and alternative knowledge-creation by amplifying indigenous voices/perspectives and local actions, using informal players like Mma Ali. Thus, guided by Ato Quayson’s 1997 notion of interdiscursivity, the proposed paper aims to examine how the novelists, by exploiting indigenous resources, resist hegemonic chronicles, construct dissenting realities and lived experiences of their Jamaican and Nigerian settings, and reinterpret development. Specifically, the paper intends to examine how textualisations of indigenous traditions, collective memories, and orality provide other means of knowing/being, reconstruct history and identity, power and development. In addition, it means to explain how such focalisations interrogate and disrupt dominant power structures and its (scripted) textual authority, facilitate inclusion, equality and equity, engender authentic sustainable development.

Key Words: Dominance, development, indigenous/alternative knowledge, and orality