SOURCE: Goodwin, K. L. “‘Nationality-Chauvinism Must Burn’: Utopian Visions in Petals of Blood and Matigari.” Literary Criterion 26, no. 3 (1991): 1-14.

In the following essay, Goodwin investigates Ngugi's blending of narrative forms in Petals of Blood and Matigari, arguing that both works move “effortlessly between realism, satire, farce, fantasy, and exhortation.”

Commonwealth literature is not everyone's notion of a viable or useful category, and some may think that it smacks of postcolonial cultural imperialism, but it is a wider (if less precise) category than ‘world literature written in English’ and has the advantage of admitting regional and national literatures that would otherwise have to find shelter under the not-necessarily-appropriate umbrellas of the ‘third world’, ‘black’, ‘Asian’, or ‘Pacific’ writing. One does not have to approve of British (or Australian, New Zealand, or United States) colonial rule to recognise that its effects on education, legal systems, writing, and culture generally continue...