(Re)Imagining Uganda Postcolony in Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles

Abstract

Colonialism and its legacy continue to inspire a lot of debate among literary critics and theorists. Moses Isegawa’s novel, Abyssinian Chronicles, weaves interconnecting personal narratives which help illuminate the larger national stories of the postcolony nation-state, Uganda. The novel, through gendered narrativization, tells stories that represent Uganda’s socio-economic, cultural and political postcolonial state. Through close reading and critical analysis, this paper focuses on (re)construction of the postcolony by relying on the memory of the gendered subjectivities in the story. The chapter directs us to narratological, post-colonial and feminist literary critiques in which the narrative demonstrates its repudiations of stereotypes and reconfigurations of gender identities as part of an agent undertaking to recover the distinctive tradition of both the African man and woman.