ABSTRACT
Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Sub-Saharan Africa was gradually drawn into the periphery of the world capitalist system via trade and colonization. This chapter analyzes the various ways Sub-Saharan fiction writers have thematized the social ramifications of structural adjustment in their work. It illustrates Sub-Saharan African fiction of the era of neoliberal globalization must, in representing the region, find ways to conceptualize through narrative the dialectic between the local and the transnational. During the era of structural adjustment Sub-Saharan Africa was the region mostly deeply impacted by this neoliberal mode of incorporation into the world economy. Unemployment quadrupled to 100 million during the first decade of Structural Adjustment Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, while average incomes declined by 20 percent, and average life expectancy dropped by 15 years. So structural adjustment has caused economic decline and vast human suffering among populations deprived of basic human services by austerity measures.
