Postmodernism and Neopragmatism in How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Abstract

The exegesis of Imbolo Mbue’s scriptural habitus in How Beautiful We Were (2021) postulates an ontological reconfiguration of political agency, situated at the intersection of a postmodern deconstruction of colonial metanarratives and a neo-pragmatist teleology of resistance. This novel, a phenomenology of dispossession, portrays the collision between the extractivist voracity of the Pexton Corporation and the resilient finitude of the Kosawa community, constructing a critique of instrumental reason within the peripheries of global capitalism. While contemporary scholarship has extensively explored the ecocritical and postcolonial dimensions of the diegesis, a critical aporia remains regarding the mutation of the militant subject: the transition from a purely discursive deconstruction of power to a praxis centered on outcome efficiency. This study addresses the obsolescence of traditional activism in the face of ubiquitous corporate biopower, necessitating a hybridization of struggle strategies. It interrogates the dialectic between the erosion of postmodern ideological certainties and a neo-pragmatist categorical imperative, shaping a new ethics of subversion where the aesthetics of sacrifice are transmuted into an engineering of political survival. The methodological framework employs a textual archaeology underpinned by a sociocriticism of forms, drawing from Maffesolian ethics of aesthetics to analyze how the novel’s narrative economy functions as a dynamic apparatus of reconfiguration. While this approach unearths ideological sedimentations and the fragmentation of the subject, it remains perpetually attuned to the fleshly irreducibility of grief as the final, non-negotiable frontier against capitalist rationality. Structurally, the investigation is bifurcated: it first scrutinizes the dissolution of metanarratives and the poetics of fragmentation through narrative polyphony, and subsequently explores the emergence of a strategic rationality, a transition from logos to techne, as the primary vector for collective emancipation in the desert of the real.