Activist nonfiction’s genre-collage form mirrors the coalition of causes it serves

Evidence

A Month and a Day is an unruly, polyvocal work, a nonfictional collage, in which Saro-Wiwa tacks back and forth among a raft of genres: diary, memoir, journal, manifesto, advocacy journalism, ethnography, and satire, throwing in for good measure some transcribed speeches and a bill of rights. The book’s disorderly syncretism is partly circumstantial: most of it was spliced together under the stresses of Saro-Wiwa’s confinement in a Port Harcourt prison. Yet one senses in the irreverent, breathless bricolage something tactical as well, the propulsive urgency of colliding forms as Saro-Wiwa strives to fit into a single book an ill-fitting set of causes by binding together, in unprecedented ways, an African commitment to environmental and human rights, to micro-minority justice, and to exposing the slow violence of what he judges to be attritional ecological genocide. The result is a book without a clear narrative itinerary or stable voice, structurally diffuse yet inventively affiliative and unwavering in its political energy. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 344

Categorization

• SEED: Nixon’s read of Saro-Wiwa’s prison-spliced genre collage as tactical — form as index of coalition building — is a strong model for analyzing other activist texts.
• XREF: connects to: Genre form refracts rather than directly reflects political ideology — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 321

Broader Connections

• Genre form refracts rather than directly reflects political ideology #expands (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 321