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This article focuses on the politics and poetics of (de)colonization that Namwali Serpell puts in place in her debut novel  The Old Drift . It argues that she first of all addresses problematic (post)colonial representations particularly by explicitly referring to and debunking colonialist Percy M. Clark’s  The Autobiography of an Old Drifter . Moreover, she allows for what Jacques Rancière has called a “re-configuration” of the “distribution of the sensible” by staging what Sara Ahmed has named “willful” characters who tackle the legacy of Scottish explorer David Livingstone, but who also live a historic moment for the Zambian nation, that of its decolonization/independence. Finally, it analyses the issues of Eurocentrism and Serpell’s willingness to decolonize the imaginary and the mind by focusing on alternative sources of historical knowledge: this enables both the characters and the readers to “wake up from the spell of Eurocentrism” in order to favour a form of “pluriversality”.

Politics and poetics of (de)colonization in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019)