Subaltern Mosquitoes and Cyborg Histories in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

Abstract: Postcolonial novelists have often felt the pressure to navigate between the local and the global, which has eased of late, owing to the rise of World Literature as a category. The latter sees the immanence of the global in the local, opening up possibilities not just for postcolonial academic enclaves but for what Fredric Jameson calls a “singular modernity.” Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift forms part of a corpus of contemporary novels that posits such possibilities, specifically in the way history can be narrated. Through an elusive cyborg narrator, the novel questions the peripheral position assigned to the “subaltern,” not just within colonial histories but also within postcolonial studies. Constitutive of a global modernity, the novel’s subaltern narrator is not merely a possible presence but an inescapable one within history, which in asserting its claims simultaneously destabilizes those of the parochially local, including those of the national.