ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 concludes Part 1 of the book with an investigation into the problems of post-truth and postnarrative. Derrida described politics as a privileged space of lying, and totalitarian regimes as ‘founded on the primacy of the lie’. Chapter 5 explores how Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out reveals the workings of what Derrida calls the lie of state in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China. Like Otoo’s Ada, the protagonist of Life and Death lives several lives, moving through a Buddhist cycle of reincarnation in different animal forms and observing how life in an authoritarian state becomes a political performance. Before and after China’s turn to capitalism, epistemic blinkers support the normalisation of injustice, as the protagonist and other characters choose not to see the things that trouble them. Returning to NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, the chapter then explores post-truth in the context of authoritarian government, and the concept of postnarrative injustice. The story of a state-driven genocide, told ‘from below’ by one of its victims, reveals that some harms are unspeakable and elude narrative; they produce ultimate epistemic injustice.
