“Jungle Dreams”

This article proposes that we revisit J.G. Ballard’s early disaster fiction—particularly The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966)—as well as the scholarship surrounding it, with closer attention to Ballard’s race politics and the coloniality and postcoloniality of his settings, characters, and symbols. I consider Ballard’s preoccupation with Africa and the African diaspora, as well as his contribution to the colonial imaginary of “Africa,” in relation to the narcissistic Eurocentric subjectivity of his novels. Seeking to address the near invisibility of central African histories and African or Afrodiasporic people within Ballard studies through an emphasis on the Cameroonian setting of The Crystal World and exploration of Ballard’s engagement with decolonization in The Drowned World, I also detail how Ballard scholarship has addressed, or failed to address, his relationship with race and with an “idea of Africa.” I suggest ways of further decolonizing the field, drawing upon central African deconstructionist traditions, with particular help from V.Y. Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, who describe the invention of Africa by colonialism. I conclude with an illustrative reading of The Crystal World that foregrounds the Echo satellite as a revelatory and transformative symbol locating the text within decolonial time.