ABSTRACT
The final chapter returns to the problems touched on at the end of Part 1, of post-truth and postnarrative, with a focus on how the novels respond creatively to those mechanisms of control. Building on the notion of guerrilla epistemology, explored in Chapter 7, which allows subaltern voices to be heard, this chapter conceptualises provoking pluralism: an aesthetic strategy that enables multiple voices and undermines heroic, monologic storytelling. It looks first at how George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo uses multiple ghost voices interspersed with multiple historical accounts, some genuine, some made up, which diverge in ways that are playfully destabilising, and at the moments in Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young when the polyphonic narrative seems to promise the future of change that the novel’s title implies. The second part of the chapter then explores storytelling in the face of mortality in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory. It concludes with a reflection on animapolitics as an antonym for Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, and animapoetics as a poetics of movement that imagines the shapes and forms in which we might live differently.
