Distance between You and Your Home: The Estrangement of Postcolonial Writing

This essay argues that the writing of postcolonial migrant authors has been critically deployed in such a way that it appears to vindicate a long standing romantic ideology of artistic detachment. In order to present an alternative account, the field of Nigerian anglophone fiction is examined here and the experiences of two aspiring authors offered as case-studies. It is argued that their experience, and the wider circumstances of Nigerian cultural production, demonstrate that postcolonial migrant writing is not an expression of ‘aesthetic alienation’, but of the estrangement that Marx recognised as a subjective consequence of capitalism.