ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concrete interconnection of violent labour regimes in republican Peru and colonial Congo through the lenses of Mario Vargas Llosa’s El Sueño del Celta (The Dream of the Celt) (2010) and In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. (2014). The analysis addresses the poetics of excess/scarcity as fundamental in understanding how authors narrate the realities of violence as a product of shared historico-economic configurations in the chequered course of global capitalism. It discusses the poetics of scarcity/excess as based on two major critical concepts that underlie the dynamics of literary narrations of violence in Peru/the Congo from an economic perspective: the coloniality of labour and the world-systems theory. Both concepts provide in-roads into a subversive reading of the violent logics that underpin both colonial discourses of civilisation and contemporary notions of globalisation.
