Afropolitanism and the Novel

De-realizing Africa

Ashleigh Harris

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000227956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The place of the novel as a literary form in Africa is contested. Its colonial origins and its unaffordability for most Africans make it a bad fit for the continent, yet it was also central to the creation of most postcolonial African national literary canons. These bipolar traditions remain unresolved in recent debates about Afropolitanism and the novel in Africa today.

This book extends this debate, arguing that Africa's 'de-realization' in global representation and the global economy is reflected in the African novel becoming dominated by Afropolitan, rather than African, aesthetics, styles, and forms. Drawing on close readings of a variety of major African novels of the 2000s, the volume traces the tensions between the novel's complicity with and resistance to such de-realization. The book argues that current trends and experiments in African non-realist genres, such as science fiction, magical and animist realism, Afro-futurism, and speculative environmentalism, are the result of a preoccupation with such de-realization.

The volume is a significant exploration into literary form and its social, philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings. It will be a must-read for scholars, students, and researchers of African literature, politics, philosophy, and culture studies.

Part I
Afropolitanism and literary legitimacy

Of the five authors who were shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013, three resided in the United States. The winner that year, Tope Folarin, whose story “A Miracle” is based on Nigerian expatriate life in America, was the first recipient of the prize not born on the continent itself. Since then all but two (South African Lidudumalingani Mqombothi and Kenyan Makena Onjerika) of the winners of the Caine Prize have been permanently living outside Africa. The 2014 winner, Okwiri Oduor, from Kenya, began an MFA degree in creative writing in the U.S. after her win; the 2015 Zambian winner, Namwali Serpell, teaches in the U.S., and the 2017 winner, Bushra al-Fadil, from Sudan, lives in Saudi Arabia. Makena Onjerika, while based in Nairobi, has an MFA degree in creative writing from New York University. This signals a much larger problem within the field of African literature; because of the economic precariousness of the book industry in Africa (see Jay 2012; Zell 2013), a large majority of Africa’s professional writers live, seek publication, and are educated in creative writing programs abroad.

We might well ask why this should pose a problem for African literature. Indeed, why not follow Taiye Selasi in her redefinition of “what it means to be African” (2013a, 529) by bringing an African view to the world in the guise of the émigré story or via the perspective of the African elsewhere? In answering this question, it is important to be clear that I do not wish to provincialize African literature or lock it in a mimetic relationship to African social reality. On the contrary, I follow Achille Mbembe’s understanding of an Afropolitanism that is “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world” (2007, 28). Moreover, I am not dismissing the importance and value of what Eileen Julien calls “extroverted African novels”, those being novels written “by novelists who … are living beyond their countries’ borders”, and which “speak outward and represent locality to nonlocal others, be they expatriate communities abroad, other African nationals on the continent, Japanese, Europeans, Brazilians, or U.S. students” (Julien 2006, 684). That said, I am interested here in understanding the “legitimizing mechanisms” (Huggan 2001, 118) that perpetually co-opt African writing for non-African readers and thereby reorient this literature away from the continent itself.

Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s increasing frustration with the Caine Prize as a non-African legitimating mechanism and authority on ‘good’ African writing is a case in point. Wainaina noted in an interview in 2008,

Until I won the Caine prize nobody in Kenya was interested in the fact that I wrote fiction, except my friends. Nobody cared. Of course, being an ex-colonial country, when you win something from abroad they regard you more… . It’s a shame on our country to get foreign legitimacy before one’s work could be appreciated.

(Umaisha 2008; cited in Pucherová 2012, 15)

By 2013, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had also noted her concern about the Caine Prize’s stature, insisting that it is not “the arbiter of the best fiction in Africa” (Bady 2013, n.p.). In September 2014, this critique intensified when Wainaina accused the Caine Prize of effacing literary production and infrastructures in Africa. He wrote,

I give the Caine Prize its due credit, but it just isn’t our institution. All these young people who are ending up in that place were built up by many people’s work. If there was no Saraba, if there was no Farafina workshop, if there was no Cassava republic, if there was no Tolu Ogunlesi meeting Nik [sic] in South Africa and then workshopping stories, if there was no Ivor Hartmann, if there were no thirty thousand Facebook groups that I know of or don’t know, there will be no Okwiri, there will be no Elnathan, etc.¹ What is happening is you people are allowing the Caine Prize to receive funding and build itself as a brand and make money and people’s career there in London while the vast majority of these institutions are vastly underfunded and vastly ungrown, and they are the ones who create the ground that is building these new writers… . I want people to say, Okwiri, who won the Caine Prize, is the founder of Jalada, an online magazine that has won five prizes in the last year and published, I think, the most exciting fiction I’ve seen in ten years. Just that magazine, has more excitement than many known ones, but they are invisible.

(Nwonwu 2014, n.p.)

The critique that Wainaina received for making this comment possibly prompted his less controlled diatribe against the Caine Prize on his Twitter account in October 2014.² The Caine Prize has undoubtedly played a significant role in putting new African writers on the global literary map and we cannot dismiss its strategic importance in legitimating African writing in the global literary arena. Yet, Wainaina points to a problem that goes far beyond this particular institution: that being a global evaluative economy in which African writing is seldom legitimated on its own terms. Even literary prizes on the continent are often complicit in this broader problem. Jennifer Wenzel discusses the Nigerian Prize for Literature, set up in 2004 with an endowment from Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas, which expressly excluded “Nigerian authors resident abroad” (Wenzel 2006, 460). She notes, alongside McPhillips Nwachukwu (2005), the

ironies of the intersection of literature, the petro-state, and its multinational patrons in the Nigerian Prize for Literature: while the prize panel … decided to keep the ‘exclusionary clause’ that limits eligibility to writers resident in Nigeria, the prize is paid in US dollars, rather than in naira.

(Wenzel 2006, 461)

Moreover, as Wenzel asks,

Is the Nigerian Prize for Literature mere window dressing for petro-violence – “lit-washing”, rather than greenwashing – from the perspective of the columns of zeros in the company’s balance sheets? Probably. Is $20,000 annually a substantial investment in literature, in a country where literary patronage is nearly nonexistent? Absolutely.

(Wenzel 2006, 461)

Similar observations might be made about the Etisalat Prize (now the 9Mobile Prize) for African Literature, which is the first Africa-based prize for debuting authors across the continent. The prize is financed by the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, under the brand name of 9Mobile. The prize for 2018 is £15,000 and a fellowship at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where the winner “will be mentored by Professor Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland” (“Etisalat Prize for Literature” 2017, n.p.). The problem of university intervention as a legitimating agent of literary quality will be discussed ahead, but the fact of the prize money being in British pounds points to the same problems noted by Wenzel earlier. Moreover, the Etisalat Prize encompasses a prize for flash fiction, being “unpublished short stories of no more than 300 words”, for which one stands, in 2018, to win “£1,000 and a high-end [mobile] device” (“Etisalat Prize for Literature” 2017, n.p.). This perfectly illustrates Sarah Brouillette’s analysis of what she calls the “World-Literary System in Crisis”. She writes,

[T]he expansion of the cultural economy, measured by the growth in the percentage of workers who identify themselves as belonging to the “immaterial” cultural sector, has in part to do with the fact that someone needs to produce the content that helps to circulate other kinds of goods, for instance personal electronic devices, by persuading us that those devices are integral to our lives as our means of access to content we would otherwise miss out on.

(Brouillette n.d., n.p.)

What better exemplification of this than a communications company sponsoring a literary prize, or – even better – sponsoring a prize for flash fiction, which can be written and consumed on the very devices that keep the telecommunications sector aloft? (See Harris and Hållén, forthcoming, for a more substantial discussion of this prize.)

The problem that Wainaina raises of the invisibility of the lively, if nascent and under-resourced, literary cultures of Africa is, then, not only about whether authors reside in Africa. Both African and non-African spaces are intersected and shaped by the flows and forms of global capital. In the part that follows I consider what this means for novels written by African émigrés. In the first instance, we see in such fictions an unsurprising turn of literary attention away from African everyday life and towards the immigrant and diaspora experience. This dynamic has concerned postcolonial writing for some time; as Brouillette notes, “[M]uch postcolonial literary scholarship has been focused on the characteristics of fiction produced by migrant writers exploring aspects of life within cosmopolitan culture, or concerned with a migrant or expatriate life away from the place of one’s birth” (Brouillette 2007, 8). But, as Eileen Julien puts it, this is “not simply a matter of a novelist’s intention to ‘write for’ a hegemonic or international audience but of multiple features that traverse or inhabit a text” (2006, 685). Rather, what “passes for the African novel is created by publishing, pedagogical, and critical practices” (685). I approach the émigré novels discussed in Part I by considering how all these factors undergird the stylistic and formal choices made by the authors. In a discussion on some of the most successful African novels of the 2000s, this part argues that this turn towards the émigré experience in today’s most widely read African literature is symptomatic of the economic de-realization described in the introduction to this book.

***

One of the problems inherent in émigré fiction is that it is most often oriented towards the immigrant society and represents the author’s homeland as a site of mourning and loss. As such, African émigré novels almost exclusively posit cosmopolitan spaces as always outside Africa. To theorize this, I turn to Jacques Derrida’s understanding of hospitality as the key scene of cosmopolitanism. For Derrida, hospitality is always fraught by the fact that “the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated” and thus “has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 15).³ Eileen Julien makes a similar observation that draws attention to how the guest/host relationship is not itself neutral when it comes to Africa. Citing Nuruddin Farah, she writes, “[T]he African is a guest whether in Africa or elsewhere” (Farah [1981] 1992, 218; cited in Julien 2006, 672). It is because of this a priori position as xenos, not hostis, that ‘the African’ comes to have an ambivalent relationship to the language of the law and is simultaneously posited as exotic. Julien observes this pattern in extroverted African fiction, stating that the

place of the African as ornament (or “colourful guest”) set forth in [such] narratives is emblematic of the presumed tension between whatever it means to be modern and whatever it means to be African. It is this tension in fact that gives rise to and is typically the central dilemma of what we call the African novel.

(Julien 2006, 673)

That “the African is ornamental, invited at the whimsy and for the pleasure of the hegemonic host” (673) re-inscribes the “Eurocentric lens” whereby the African “is extraneous to the production of knowledge, wealth and power that have characterized the twentieth century” (672). This problem is precisely what prompts Graham Huggan to ask,

What role do exotic registers play in the construction of cultural value, more specifically those types of value (re)produced by postcolonial products and (re)presented in postcolonial discourse? How are these exoticisms marketed for predominantly metropolitan audiences – made available, but also palatable, for their target consumer public?

(Huggan 2001, viii)

The legitimizing mechanisms of the publishing industry have already been observed by critics such as Timothy Brennan, who notes that the “strength and prestige of the U.S. publishing industry cannot be discounted as an important … recruiter, trainer, and final arbiter of literary trends: a kind of corporate literary salon” (Brennan 1997, 39). Furthermore, a major new site of literary legitimization, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., is creative writing education. The Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing plays a particularly important role as a guarantor of literary ability and value and shaper of literary expectation in ways that are reminiscent of the literary coffee houses and salons of the eighteenth century. Just as Jürgen Habermas saw the salon and the coffee house as both generating a public sphere and legitimizing literature (Habermas 1991, 33), so too does the creative writing degree operate as simultaneous producer and legitimator of the literary public sphere today. This is particularly important when considering contemporary African literature, given that many of the biggest-selling African authors today hold degrees from western universities, a fact that is always prominently included in their books’ paratexts.

In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, an account of “the remarkably smooth entry of the discipline of creative writing into the U.S. university over the past fifty years” (McGurl 2011, 21), Mark McGurl sees the creative writing workshops as generating “the spirit of communal endeavour and mutual influence found in the Paris and Greenwich village café scenes of an earlier era” (215). For McGurl, the institutional history of creative writing programs in U.S. universities cannot be understated in the form, aesthetics, and tendency towards self-reflexivity of post-war American fiction. Indeed, it is the key site in which American writing has formulated its distinctive post-war characteristics of what McGurl calls “technomodernism”, “high cultural pluralism”, and “lower-middle-class modernism” (32). These have become the forms of certain material, economic, and institutional histories that now pervade post-war American fiction. McGurl’s analysis of how these major tenets in post-war writing are formulated in the pedagogical principles underlying creative writing programs is too detailed and nuanced to outline here, but of greatest significance for my own argument is his insistence that the creative writing program has consistently produced the idea of creative writing as a dynamic triangular interplay between “authentic experience and observation” (“write what you know”), “creativity and freedom” (“find your voice”), and “craft and tradition” (“show, don’t tell”) (23). The formation emerging from within this triangular conception of creative writing that concerns us here is what McGurl calls “high cultural pluralism”: that which “combines the routine operation of modernist autopoetics with a rhetorical performance of cultural group membership pre-eminently … marked as ethnic” (56). Importantly, “the high cultural pluralist writer is … called upon to speak from the point of view of one or another hyphenated population, synthesizing the particularity of ethnic – or analogously marked – voice with the elevated idiom of literary modernism” (57).

McGurl’s remark carries greater force when we consider the increasing number of successful contemporary African prose writers, particularly novelists, who have completed MFA creative writing degrees, or who are fellows at these academic departments in the United States, the United Kingdom,⁴ and elsewhere (recall, too, Etisalat’s 2018 prize of writing tuition at UEA).⁵ What is of particular significance here is that the African writer’s presence on the creative writing program in the Global North is predetermined as the sign of “high cultural pluralism”, thereby calling that writer to write in an ethnically inflected voice of literary modernism (to paraphrase McGurl). The creative writing class might, then, be interpreted as an instrument of Graham Huggan’s commodity fetishism, which he describes as “the veiling of the material circumstances under which commodities are produced and consumed” (Huggan 2001, 18). This issue has received relatively substantial debate when it comes to the content, and even style, of the African texts in American writi...