Postmodernism and Neopragmatism in How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Daniel Tia

International Journal of Culture and History, 2026, vol. 13, issue 1, 61

Abstract: The exegesis of Imbolo Mbue’s scriptural habitus in How Beautiful We Were (2021) postulates an ontological reconfiguration of political agency, situated at the intersection of a postmodern deconstruction of colonial metanarratives and a neo-pragmatist teleology of resistance. This novel, a phenomenology of dispossession, portrays the collision between the extractivist voracity of the Pexton Corporation and the resilient finitude of the Kosawa community, constructing a critique of instrumental reason within the peripheries of global capitalism. While contemporary scholarship has extensively explored the ecocritical and postcolonial dimensions of the diegesis, a critical aporia remains regarding the mutation of the militant subject- the transition from a purely discursive deconstruction of power to a praxis centered on outcome efficiency. This study addresses the obsolescence of traditional activism in the face of ubiquitous corporate biopower, necessitating a hybridization of struggle strategies. It interrogates the dialectic between the erosion of postmodern ideological certainties and a neo-pragmatist categorical imperative, shaping a new ethics of subversion where the aesthetics of sacrifice are transmuted into an engineering of political survival. The methodological framework employs a textual archaeology underpinned by a sociocriticism of forms, drawing from Maffesolian ethics of aesthetics to analyze how the novel’s narrative economy functions as a dynamic apparatus of reconfiguration. While this approach unearths ideological sedimentations and the fragmentation of the subject, it remains perpetually attuned to the fleshly irreducibility of grief as the final, non-negotiable frontier against capitalist rationality. Structurally, the investigation is bifurcated- it first scrutinizes the dissolution of metanarratives and the poetics of fragmentation through narrative polyphony, and subsequently explores the emergence of a strategic rationality, a transition from logos to techne, as the primary vector for collective emancipation in the desert of the real.

Date: 2026
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