I re-read Ayi Kwei Armah’s oeuvre as penned to interrogate postcolonial African modernities that are inextricably linked to counter-cultures and lifeworlds in which matters of identity, questions of belonging, habitats of solidarity, and a resolute sense of being and becoming in the world are negotiated in perennially unfinished processes of transformation. Commencing with The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and moving on to Fragments and finally Two Thousand Seasons Armah generates seminal ideas pertinent to mapping the postcolonial through the optics of multipolar power structures and transcultural flows, re-inventing a whole universe of discourse predicated on the question of who owns and who should own the repertoire of cultural, linguistic, political, and material resources of the postcolonial nation. For lack of space, I make passing remarks on Why are we so blest? The Healers and Osiris Rising to establish how Armah engages with the formation of hybrid contact zones between English and vernacular tongues as well as global circuits of the post-national cultural imaginaries. I operationalise the recommendation by Chidi Amuta who advises that ‘literary creativity as a form of praxis is the starting point for an anti-imperialist aesthetics of African literature’. Amuta further adds that ‘the need to historicise our explications and evaluations dictates that critical practice insists on the dialectical relationship between the context of the work and its specific content and form’. This positioning of the reader-critic complements the argument by Ndlovu-Gatsheni who contends that the future of African studies limns a clear epistemic implication, if one thinks from the Global South, not as a geography, but as an epistemic site of resistance to colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and environmental terrorism.