Fiction and State Crisis

The conventional wisdom that contemporary fiction has little use for the nation cannot explain the plurality of recent novels that attend to states in crisis. To detail the effects of state collapse is, at the very least, to insist on the state's continued relevance to the form. I argue that this fiction of failure also has a stake in the state's future, which it demonstrates by treating civil war as a setting for generic experimentation. I offer an admittedly truncated genealogy of literary interest in state crisis to suggest how fiction collaborates with political scientific scholarship in defining the failed state as a more or less normative condition in much of the world. In so doing, these writings subordinate the notion of the state as a setting for national development or popular self-determination. Instead they portray the state as a context that shapes and is shaped by experts in their administration of populations. Fiction's collaboration with political science takes shape as a counter discourse. Where social science privileges quantitative data, literature counters with the qual ity of local knowledge. A good recent example is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun, which supplements think tank statistics measuring state instability with a narrative of civil war written from the standpoint of its survivors. Half of a Yellow Sun offers a detailed account of everyday life before and during the late 1960s Biafran civil war. In so doing, the novel argues that life dur ing such a crisis can be conceived as ordinary existence, of an admittedly violent variety. To put this somewhat differently, Adichie's fiction fleshes out the notion that what goes on in the most unstable of states is never so extreme that it cannot be normed.