Gerald Vizenor and Kojo Laing in Weberian Flights of Reenchantment: Ambivalent Spatial and Temporal Modernities in Ghana and White Earth

This article brings together The Trickster of Liberty by Gerald Vizenor and Woman of the Aeroplanes by B. Kojo Laing. These two novels, both published in 1988, engage in strikingly similar projects of imaginative resistance to the disenchantment of modernity, despite having originated in vastly different cultural, historical, and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on Max Weber’s account of rationalization and its attendant bureaucratic temporal and spatial logics, the article explores how both novels deploy absurdist humour, linguistic play, and narrative disjunction to re-enchant literary form and social possibility. Through communities that exist at a deliberate remove from the nation-state and characters who resist temporal linearity and spatial fixity, Laing and Vizenor articulate an “alt-modern” aesthetic: one that neither nostalgically idealizes tradition nor capitulates to modernization’s deterministic teleologies. Instead, each novelist crafts a speculative and playful futurism that destabilizes Eurocentric categories of progress and offers new possibilities for cultural survivance. By attending to the resonances between these authors without flattening their cultural particularities, this article contributes to decolonial comparative methodologies and to broader conversations about Indigenous and postcolonial literary futures.