Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 35black liberationist writing.”^25 According to Ledent, the “intertextual
echoes” that can be observed to varying degrees in all three stories in
the novel reflect a “revisionary strategy” that encourages the reader
to dismantle “monolithic discourses” and “deepens our understand-
ing of the central character’s painful identity-construction.”^26 W h i l e
these same points could be made about Irene (her narrative does
indeed highlight the difficulties of maintaining a singular and coher-
ent “voice”), they are particularly relevant to the Williams narrative.
As Ledent argues, the “Cargo Rap” that Williams presents conforms
to the key features of the genre by borrowing and mixing from a
variety of sources, and in a very deliberate, overt manner.^27 W i l l i a m s
weaves the work of Frantz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and
many others, into his narrative, more often than not to add weight to
the aggressively prosyletizing political letters he sends to his friends
and family. Thus, while Williams’s narrative is polyphonic in the
sense of it comprising a wide range of historical voices, it is also
at the same time myopic in its sociocultural and political orienta-
tion. As well as being offensive and often contradictory (on certain
occasions he rebukes the white political establishment for its geno-
cidal treatment of “the African” but then advocates getting rid of
the “white lice” in South Africa [pp. 81–82]), Williams’s philosophy
is also untenable on a more fundamental level because of its unreal-
istically essentialist nature. Africans are a “race” with inherent per-
sonality traits and dispositions, he tells us, who have “always had a
sad tendency to be adopted by, and then rely upon, the white man”
(p. 135). Such essentialist reasoning is of course highly problematic
for a variety of reasons, but with regard to the specific concerns of
this study, it is also troublesome because it goes against some of the
principal ideas both of postcolonial and of cosmopolitan thought.
However, it signifies a way of thinking that is very consistent with
some of the values of the Black Power or Black Panther movements.
Indeed, Williams’s thoughts resonate in this regard with the type
of deleteriously essentialist notions of (especially black) identity
that Gilroy criticizes in The Black Atlantic, which rely on a “defen-
sive posture against the unjust powers of white supremacy.”^28 S u c h
rigid and reactionary conceptions of identity politics are harmful,
Gilroy argues, because they do not countenance the social and