ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, scholarship worldwide has been attempting to assess the memory of the alleged 1989 failure of the leftist revolution and decolonization. As early as 1966, when Marxist critics complained that Western philosophy lacked political action, Jacques Derrida famously quipped “history is already over”. But far from being over, the termed “Third World” disappointment and the trend of authoritarian regimes rising throughout the Global South have generated debates regarding how to construct a future of solidarities based on these internationalist histories. This is especially true in light of the ways in which anti-colonial lenses have been critiqued for their deemed uncritical support of literary texts conjuring this decolonial era, on the one hand, and postcolonial theory snubbing contemporary texts that are deemed too critical of Third Worldism, on the other. 1 Yet, these discursive viewpoints set up a dichotomy between postcolonial resistance critique and its reparative counterpart, leaving out any other possibilities for assessing an ideological recovery of this leftist era. This happens even in light of contemporary works in Latin America and Africa speaking to each other. Because these works reflect on the Third World left era from the vantage point of the present, they also tend to be pessimistic, and therefore dismissed by anticolonial critique or misunderstood by postcolonial studies. But one of the main issues at hand is that comparative studies still categorize literature according to colonial languages, rarely considering the south–south interaction, for instance, between Francophone African and Latin American texts and the possible ways this engagement might challenge the resistance versus reparative paradigm for Cold war era temporalities.
