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Abstract

Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015) has frequently been described as a “race-rewrite” of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). This framing has shaped much of the critical conversation surrounding the two texts. While these approaches productively illuminate questions of identity and biopolitics, less attention has been paid to situating both texts across the intersecting contexts of German modernism and Nigerian postcolonial literature. This article provides a close comparative reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Igoni Barrett’s Blackass in order to examine how Kafkaesque elements are reconfigured within a contemporary postcolonial Nigerian context. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature, alongside race and postcolonial theory, the article demonstrates how both texts deploy metamorphosis as a political and aesthetic strategy to interrogate marginality, identity, and social power. While Kafka’s 1915 novella presents alienation within the structures of early twentieth-century European modernity, Barrett’s 2015 novel places this experience within the dynamics of postcolonial Nigerian society, racial capitalism, and contemporary regimes of white privilege. By foregrounding the century-long historical distance between the two texts, this article argues that Blackass does not merely adapt Kafka but deterritorializes his modernist aesthetics to expose the changing yet persistent operations of otherness and racial hierarchy across time and space. The article thus positions Barrett’s novel as a significant transnational and comparative intervention in Kafka studies and world literature.

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