Just like his fiction, D. Nandi Odhiambo’s The Minoritarian and Black Reason is simultaneously a work of ethics and aesthetics that disturbs the dogmatic image of thought. From readings of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist, to Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, The Minoritarian assembles a cast of thinkers who creatively produce a language within language by refusing the call of standardized sameness.
— Sam Okoth Opondo, Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies, Vassar College
According to Nandi Odhiambo’s breathtakingly cerebral interrogation of European Caucasian philosophy of the modern era (i.e., the period of Transatlantic Slavery and European Imperialist
Colonization of Africa, plus “Native” attempts at Desegregation and Decolonization), the paleface paragons of Reason have been no better than high-collared or dog-collared bounty hunters, still in dogmatic pursuit of the still-in-flight, Black Refugee or Fugitive subject. Odhiambo reads (or arraigns) Descartes, Defoe, Kant, et al., to picture their thought as attempts to chase down (in bluesy metaphor) the Image of the African persona and to perennially pen (pun intended) this Other within the category of the barbaric, the backward, the recidivist, the unenlightened, the criminal. While conducting this forensic analysis, Odhiambo posits “minoritarian” thought as the black battering ram that consistently bursts open the would-be penitentiary that is White (Authoritarian) Rule—or “majoritarian” thought. For Odhiambo, the struggle for emancipation is unfinished—unless and until the Ivory Tower ceases to be a guard-tower for imprisoned Black subjects, falsely regarded. He reads like Fanon matched with Morrison—or like Angela Davis and Nanny-of-the-Maroons, making guerilla raids against plantations of racialist (in)articulation.
— George Elliott Clarke, University of Toronto