Come and see BPhil Candidate Tobin Richter present and defend his thesis. Tobin interprets the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez 1967) and The Old Drift (Namwali Serpell 2019) as decolonial texts which call for the dismantling of the cultural, political, and economic inequalities created by colonialism, which continue to relegate the Global South to a subordinate position in the modern world. He focusses on cultural decolonization which he defines as a practice of rejecting Eurocentric and racist interpretations of the history of the Global South and its people, asserting the value of histories, traditions, and forms of expression devalued by the Global North, and theorizing what an equitable world could look like. To show how this definition operates in the two novels, he reads them through the theories of decolonial thinkers like Aníbal Quijano and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. This research examines literature's role in contesting hegemonic narratives and imagining alternatives to dominant social, political and economic models.
