In its emphasis on reading as bound up with agency, Red Moon repudiates not only the domestic near fiction but also the reading practices commonly labelled ‘surface reading’, as they would seek to reinstate a divide between aesthetics and politics. Although the novel registers the pull of the body, it makes it codependent on a social totality that is itself reconceptualised in the wake of ecological emergency. The collective vessel for this body is the superpower state, which not only wields power enough to change the course of the Anthropocene but is also accessible to a narrative that leads out from the present without heading straight into apocalypse. The chapter ends by considering Red Moon as an instance of the historical novel set in the future, in which the utopian nation state, and the collectivity that underpins it, only exists as a dialectical relationship between part and whole, space and time.

According to Carpentier, Columbus rounded, rounded off, and rounded up the planet at a very high cost for the Indigenous cultures of nuestra América (our America). Gradually, a new culture emerged from all the possible hybridizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Carpentier also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there had to be a tradition: the first narratives were for domestic consumption, and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the avalanche began with El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). It was in effect the return to Europe of the galleons that once left Palos de Moguer in Spain, but now carrying another, different, culture. Several factors contributed to Carpentier’s awakening in postwar Europe: the dominance of fiction, somewhat exhausted by the weight of tradition and tired avant-garde formulas, was supplemented by a growing interest in the documentary, thanks to advances in photography and printing. Meanwhile, in Latin America a new approach to the novel was generated via storytelling, linking the particular to the universal. The historical novel was transformed and now demonstrated, alongside an only partially explored physical world, the questions that preoccupy all humankind.

According to Carpentier, Columbus rounded, rounded off, and rounded up the planet at a very high cost for the Indigenous cultures of nuestra América (our America). Gradually, a new culture emerged from all the possible hybridizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Carpentier also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there had to be a tradition: the first narratives were for domestic consumption, and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the avalanche began with El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). It was in effect the return to Europe of the galleons that once left Palos de Moguer in Spain, but now carrying another, different, culture. Several factors contributed to Carpentier’s awakening in postwar Europe: the dominance of fiction, somewhat exhausted by the weight of tradition and tired avant-garde formulas, was supplemented by a growing interest in the documentary, thanks to advances in photography and printing. Meanwhile, in Latin America a new approach to the novel was generated via storytelling, linking the particular to the universal. The historical novel was transformed and now demonstrated, alongside an only partially explored physical world, the questions that preoccupy all humankind.

The focus of Chapter 3 is mainly on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I argue that the expansion of social subsystems triggered by colonial modernity unfolds against a background of different historical rhythms, not all of which are explicitly foregrounded within the novels. I suggest that these barely visible overlapping histories generate a number of rhetorical sedimentations to the representation of both historical processes and the Igbo ethno-text (ethnographic details) that also illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle disruptions of colonial modernity. To grasp the nature of the multi-synchronous historical character of these texts, I read both the historical and ethnographic details of Achebe’s novels as discursive thresholds rather than as cultural particularities. Thus, the characters Okonkwo and Ezeulu are both victims of historical transformations of which they are barely conscious.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, Okonkwo, Ezeulu, colonial modernity, colonial interpellation, Fanon, foundational narratives, gossip, osu (sacred caste), slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, David Scott, Georg Lukács, the historical novel, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, volatile proximity between different historical lifeworlds, Christianity, ethical choice.