![]() Serpell’s novel is more than a (pseudo-)fictional postcolonial epic of Zambian history. But I also don’t think they mean or say much about the novel as a cultural object, as a thing from which we can learn. Indeed, reviews of The Old Drift are replete with adjectives like epic, masterpiece, grand, astounding, powerful, and more-and I don’t dispute these, insofar as they point to one kind of aesthetic, affective, or artistic experience of the novel. ![]() It is, as more than one critic put it and as Serpell herself has joked, an attempt to write the Great Zambian Novel and its size (at more than five hundred pages), allusions to the Western (and non-Western) literary tradition, endless play with language, incorporation of historical and contemporary texts, commentary on changing national-political landscapes, blending of real and fictional histories and biographies, attention to sexual and racial politics, and critiques of capitalism and colonialism attest to its likely achievement of this status. ![]() ![]() Namwali Serpell’s 2019 novel The Old Drift is the sweeping, multigenerational saga of three families whose personal histories converge over the course of more than a century on the shores of the Zambezi river, and in the eventual shadow of the Kariba Dam, from the dawn of the twentieth century to 2024. ![]()
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