Rethinking Postcolonial Resistance in Niger-Delta Literature

In “A Thriving Postcolonialism: Toward an Anti-Postcolonial Discourse,” Grant Farred suggests that postcolonialism “has to be at once politically new (and renewed) and old.” ¹ While Farred agrees that certain strategies of the “anticolonial struggle” are worth keeping, he insists that the new postcolonialism “has to distinguish what was efficacious [in the anticolonial struggle] from what was not, what can be applied to the new terrain and what cannot.” ² I begin my chapter with Farred’s work because of its call for a postcolonialism that revises or at least rethinks the anticolonial strategies of the old colonial and postcolonial liberation struggles. More specifically, Farred’s work opens up a space for the case I make about rethinking violence as a strategy of postcolonial resistance in the Niger-Delta context discussed in this chapter.