Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Moradewun Adejunmobi, Carli Coetzee, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Carli Coetzee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351859370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics.

Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works.

The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis.

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

Introduction

Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee

This Handbook is a volume of critical approaches applied to literature, and its subject is African literary studies. Its contents are intended to materialize a project of expanding and complexifying scholarship in African literary studies as a research area in its own right. Our goal as editors has been to make a range of critical engagements with African literature more visible to scholars working in this area, but also to provide additional impetus for pushing beyond the boundaries of familiar critical engagements with African literature. The result in this edited work is an emphasis on more recent rather than more established critical approaches. Specifically, The Handbook of African Literature aims to serve as an aggregation of studies of African literary texts embodying some of the newer critical approaches from the end of the twentieth to the early decades of the twenty-first century. Deliberately, chapters in this Handbook are not grouped under such customary headings as ‘Postcolonial Theory’ or ‘Globalism’ or ‘Afropessimism’ though these terms and related propositions are surely implicated in the kinds of interpretations advanced by several of our contributors. Because the adopted headings do not correspond to any specific and already-determined body of principles, they better enable the Handbook to fulfill its mission as a template for extending the scope of African literary studies. In short, these are headings whose subjects of inquiry are far from being settled and sedimented. For this reason, they remain open to revision and for the accretion of additional analytical proposals as opportunity presents itself.

We seek then, in this volume, to further encourage the development of a robust practice of critical engagement with African literature where the most sophisticated forms of literary criticism expressly focused on African literature are at the center rather than the periphery of expanding scholarship in world literary studies. This does not mean neglecting other relevant streams of literary theorizing, but using our readings of African literature as occasions to propose new questions for world literary studies. It also means using our application of critical frameworks developed on the basis of reading non-African literatures as an opportunity to review the questions already being debated in African literary criticism, rather than undertaking these tasks as ends in themselves. However, and in order to proffer additional directions for theorizing starting with African literary studies, we will need to move away from a default position that consists of invoking African literature merely as an illustration for existing theories, but not as a basis for crafting alternative modes of investigation and theoretical insight.

In many respects, the Handbook of African Literature responds to the concern expressed in Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson’s compendium, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory regarding the relative invisibility of African literary criticism (2007, 1). However, and unlike Olaniyan and Quayson’s volume, this Handbook is not an anthology of African literary theorizing. Instead it offers a collection of critical readings of diverse works of African literature, organized around critical points of entry, rather than around the more commonplace classifications of genre and periodization, such as, for example, the novel, poetry, twentieth century drama, orature and so on.¹ In its organization, the Handbook is conceptualized as a fountainhead for additional research rather than as an encyclopedic reference work. The entry points for critical engagement in this Handbook are grouped under seven headings, each comprising four chapters, and covering subjects that have attracted attention among critics of African literature in recent time. There can be little doubt that the seven sections of the Handbook do not represent a totality of possible approaches to African literature for the current time. They are merely staging posts intended to signal a format for broadening critical conversation around African literature by developing additional aggregations of related subjects for discussion.

Many contributors to the Handbook focus on literary texts written after 2000, not because they are more significant than earlier works, but because we are of the opinion that developing new models for engaging these texts is called for. With the exception of the chapters in the section of the Handbook titled ‘Literary Networks,’ each chapter provides an original interpretation of one or more works of African literature. Like Olaniyan and Quayson (2007, 1), we, too, believe that ‘African literary and critical production are not discrete entities, but in a relationship of both supportive and critical, mutually affective intimacy.’ African literature here is always read in context: in the context of other interpretations of similar works (theme, author, regional provenance), in the context of significant and relevant debates in humanities and social science research, in the context of other literary studies, but principally in dialogue with African literary studies. Accordingly, we endorse a methodology that might be described as one of highly contextualized interpretation, referencing as many relevant critical and theoretical frameworks as are applicable, and always including those that refer specifically to African literature and African studies. These interpretations do not stand on their own but always take as their starting point a wider debate in critical theory or a subject of inquiry in humanities and/or social science research. The chapters in individual sections of the Handbook are also positioned so that each chapter can be read in dialogue with other chapters in its section (though the authors worked independently of each other), and within a larger context of critical interpretations of African literature. Because we intend the Handbook to be an instigation to further research, our method of engaging with individual sections does not so much involve summary as the elaboration of pointers indicating how chapters connect to other scholarship on African and related literatures and to other works of African literature. The description of chapters and sections that follows offers a preliminary, and by no means exhaustive, identification of apposite questions and apposite texts that might be invoked in extending and redrawing the map of areas of interest in African literary studies.

Before proceeding any further, we should point out that there are obvious omissions in the Handbook. There is only one chapter in the Handbook dedicated to the interpretation of a dramatic text (the chapter by Ying Cheng). There are no chapters presenting an examination of African poetry, much as we would have wanted to include one. Readers might be forgiven for concluding that the term African literature refers here mainly to prose narratives (the novel, short stories, fiction), and overwhelmingly to prose narratives written in English, although some chapters also consider works written in French (such as the chapters by Anna-Leena Toivanen, Jesse Arseneault and Pim Higginson). The two chapters referencing African literature in African languages are both in the section titled ‘Literary Networks,’ which do not feature interpretations of specific works. These elisions and omissions are not intentional, nor are they designed to suggest a hierarchy for African literature, with the novel written in English occupying the highest rung of the ladder. To the contrary, both happenstance and serendipity are at work in the range of contents for the Handbook. On the one hand, the specific works discussed represent particular areas of interest for our contributors. Partly, also, the omissions identified can be attributed to the constraints of time and space which prevented other interested scholars from participating in this project or from completing commissioned chapters. Additionally, however, we should acknowledge that we were not aiming for a full coverage of extant critical approaches in this single volume. What the Handbook offers, instead, is a ‘Kodak moment’ from the early twenty-first century indicating the directions currently being pursued by scholars located differently around the world at this point in time.²

Assembling chapters for this Handbook compelled us to also ponder the politics of the scholarly anthology and the interventions that anthologies make. If scholarship on African literature has become a global subject in the sense that it is studied around the world, the majority of critics who participate in engendering this global subject are in many respects local and localized scholars, who differ in their understanding of reasonable material for investigation, acceptable methodologies and even acceptable registers of language to deploy. Research concerns that enjoy salience in one location may be considered unworthy of attention in other locations. As critics, we belong to particular scholarly traditions and networks that are often valuable, but can also present investigative blind spots. This anthology comprising the work of differently located scholars gives some sense of the concerns that matter for individual scholars in diverse locations and how we might bring these concerns into dialogue with each other.

To facilitate cross-referencing between different chapters representing a wide spread of scholarly traditions and locations, we made a decision that all chapters would be written in the same language. We did not want a technically representative sample of scholarship from around the world where it would be possible to ignore some chapters on the basis of a lack of proficiency in the language used. We recognize that all potentially interested readers might not have proficiency in English, and hope there will be opportunities to translate the entire volume into one or more additional languages. However, and as an acknowledgment of the fact that our contributors and readers operate in different educational settings, we have left the different spellings of English used in each contributor’s location intact.

Mapping Political Agencies

The chapters in the first section of the Handbook, titled ‘Mapping Political Agencies’ invoke the political in ways that do not necessarily reference governmentality or the state. In the current neoliberal era, which has resulted in a reorganization of the scope of the state in Africa, and in some instances, led to an actual disempowering of the state, it makes sense to interrogate other visions of the political that are not expressly premised on the expectation of direct interventions from the African state as currently constituted. In the opening chapter of this section, Monica Popescu’s examination of generational differences among two Kenyan writers in their responses to the Cold War uncovers an overlooked tangent in the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Binyavanga Wainaina. But also, and in foregrounding often neglected political mobilizations, Popescu’s chapter draws attention to the ways in which heeding divergent and sometimes forgotten political projects might make for a remapping of the field of African literature. Drawing inspiration from Popescu’s chapter, we would invite readers of the Handbook to identify other overlooked political ‘master plans’ in order to consider how these forgotten political agendas and moments complicate our reading of individual texts and our mapping of a field. While both sets of works addressed in Popescu’s chapter were written by authors from a single nation, it is worth asking what insights we might gain by deploying the same model beyond the nation in an act of remapping. Supposing, for example, we read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace alongside Ferdinand Oyono’s Une Vie de boy as tales of destroyed reputations, how would this change our perception of African literary responses to actions undertaken by agents of the state across the continent?

In their chapters, both Chielozona Eze and Allison Mackey attend to questions of agency as an instantiation of the political outside the formal realm occupied by politicians. They both examine how authors, narrators and characters in literary texts achieve agential status and how the agency attributed to any of these subject positions connects to an understanding of political ethics. While Mackey focuses on the ownership of voice by the presumed narrators recounting the kind of African political crises that generate calls for humanitarian intervention, Eze’s chapter works in the opposite direction in eschewing consideration of ethical choices made in what, following Njabulo Ndebele, he describes as the spectacular realm of grand political action. Mackey’s chapter can be read alongside Laura Murphy’s (2015a, 2015b) articles on the ownership of voice in what she characterizes as ‘new slave narratives’ or Dominic Thomas’s (2006) work on textual ownership in African literature. Eze’s chapter provides an opportunity to return to discussions among African writers themselves as well as among critics about the relationship between structural change and personal agency. In privileging the agency of the individual as Eze does here, do we run the risk of underplaying the radius and reach of systemic constructs? Should we interpret Ndebele’s call for attentiveness to the ordinary as an invitation to foreground the personal and the internal over the structural?

In her chapter, Toivanen analyzes texts where authors take on a subject with obvious ramifications for political organization, namely labor, imagined here outside of a context of political mobilization. In the texts that Toivanen discusses such as Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs, the criminal gang has supplanted the labor union and the brotherhood of men depicted with so much care in Ousmane Sembène’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu. Toivanen’s chapter invites us to consider African migration, not only from the perspective of Afropolitan mobility, but also from the point of view of the experiences of an ultimately servile work force. On the one hand, mobility enables a new form of resource extraction – the extraction of African labor. On the other hand, and in her discussion of Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, Toivanen indicates how mobility awakens a new consciousness of the conditions under which servile populations toil. She mentions for example the internationally mobile protagonist, Deola noticing and wondering about the plight of her brother’s workers in Nigeria. This moment in the narrative recalls a similar scene in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007, 274–275) where another well-traveled protagonist, Olanna, is distressed by the way her wealthy mother in Nigeria treats the hired help. Although Adichie’s novel does not make explicit the connection between Olanna’s experience of international travel and her attentiveness to the exploitat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: Mapping Political Agencies
• PART II: Journeys, Geographies, Identities
• PART III: Working through Genres
• PART IV: The World of and beyond Humans
• PART V: Everyday Sociality
• PART VI: Bodies, Subjectivities, Affect
• PART VII: Literary Networks
• Index