The African Novel of Ideas

Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691212401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature.Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of "philosophical suicide" by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought.The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.

PART I

National Horizons

CHAPTER ONE

Ethiopia Unbound as Afro-Comparatist Novel

THE CASE FOR LIBERATED SOLITUDE

In conclusion, universality resides in this decision to bear the burden of the reciprocal relativism of differing cultures, provided only that the colonial status is irrevocably excluded.

—FRANTZ FANON, “RACISM AND CULTURE” (1956)

THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE of the African novel’s development begins around the time that colonialism ends, usually dating from the late 1950s. It is often structured around a tension between cultural diffusion and cultural consolidation, which is to say between hybridistic, or cosmopolitan, and more nativist or nationalist ways of defining the form’s response to British imperial rule. The nuances and blind spots of these broad-strokes positions have been dissected ad nauseam, and it is not my intention to “take a side” again in this chapter. I begin here, rather, to establish a baseline for how an African novelistic genealogy whose terms derive from the independence era circumscribes even critical debate, entrenching truisms that do not hold up in broader historical framings. The familiar opposition of multiplicity and resistance—which has its oft-cited academic corollary in “postcolonial theory” versus more hard-line Afrocentric schools of thought—in fact foregrounds a common critical practice that sees individual subjects in fiction as stand-ins for a social situation. The individual is instrumentalized by the African novel, not instrumental of some analytic function within it. At its best, the tendency to read African characters as social microcosms has provided a useful foil to Eurocentric literary standards, often limitedly rooted in psychological depth to demonstrate character development. At its worst, however, it has led to a bias toward seeing African writing as transparently sociological, rather than as depicting a complex negotiation between shaping and being shaped by the world.

To this I now add that intellectual cultivation—the practice of learning and reflecting—is all but entirely squeezed out of the picture of what it is that African novels best showcase to the world. In this chapter, I thus look back to an earlier, often neglected literary context in which individuals’ power to craft philosophical arguments was valorized as a key part of anticolonial reform, pushing beyond the implicit assumption that the coherent “liberal self” and the collective goals of liberation were somehow opposed. I turn, specifically, to proto-nationalist Anglo-Fante intellectual life on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter upholds one of its main figures—the pan-Africanist lawyer, politician, and man of letters J. E. Casely Hayford—as exemplary of a literary practice that is at once fiercely liberationist and wedded to individuals’ capacity for rational, “objective” exchange across humanistic traditions. His seminal 1911 novel Ethiopia Unbound foregrounds a standard of evenhanded conceptual comparability rather than just cultural restitution, using a main character who toggles between reflective solitude and a dispassionate mode of public engagement to foster discrete and complementary realms for “felt” experience and intellectual engagement. As a result, the proactive comparison of African and European traditions appears not only as a burden imposed by empire, but as a means of honing an intellectual confidence that thwarts its undue influence. The implications are significant: the African novel and its attendant conceptual traditions, instead of demanding a sometimes patronizing revision of what “counts” as intellectual content (a pervasive kind of “different but equal” approach), are cast as full-fledged philosophical interlocutors. Casely Hayford’s explicit intellectualism and emphasis on solitary erudition, coupled with an abiding commitment to race-based institutional reform, allows his novel to straddle investments in lived political dynamics and what Dambudzo Marechera once called the “ideal cosmos” of literature “co-existing with this crude one” (1987/2007, 186).

The following chapter moves through three sections that elaborate comparison as an Afro-originating intellectual model that insists on lateral, conceptually grounded exchange, with the individual philosopher serving as a kind of lever. First, it surveys the rocky relationship between the academic fields of comparative literature and African literary studies, establishing the broader literary discipline’s “global turn” as both a challenge and a boon to the comparative enterprise. Both fields, I suggest, have struggled to maintain a clear analytic object as they have shifted away from a delimited textual archive and toward more diffuse concepts of culture and relation. I argue that comparative philosophy—and specifically, comparative Akan-European projects by Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Anthony Appiah—offers a valuable alternative model that retains the precision of more traditional comparative methodologies (which worked with bounded literary traditions) without sacrificing the imperative to geographically de-hierarchize the field. In the second section, I let this theoretical foundation serve as a space into which Ethiopia Unbound and its rich Anglo-Fante intellectual moment retroactively intervene. Finally, I take the measure of better-known, less comparatively inclined works in the later Anglo-Fante tradition against the precedent set by Casely Hayford and his milieu. I contend that intellectualism—elaborated here as a conceptual rather than subjective orientation—evolves from a driving force of Ghanaian novelistic development at the twentieth century’s start into depiction as a flatter, subsidiary category of personal experience by the postcolonial era.

Comparison between the Global and the Decolonial

Comparative literature has a troubled reputation for neglecting non-Western traditions.¹ Most narratives of the discipline as it is practiced in English begin just slightly in advance of conventional accounts of postcolonial literature, which is to say, following World War II and anticipating the formal dissolution of the British empire. This coincides, of course, with the ratcheting up of the Cold War, and so “comp lit,” as it’s known in the American university, becomes a self-conceived bastion of cosmopolitanism against the nationalistic tide. Jonathan Culler offers a summary to this effect in an essay called “Whither Comparative Literature?”:

Comparative literature has been differentiated from other modes of literary study because it did not take it for granted, as did the departments of English, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, that a national literature in its historical evolution was the natural and appropriate unit of literary study. Since comparative literature could not avoid, as the national literature departments could, the question of what sorts of units were most pertinent—genres? periods? themes?—comparative literature frequently became the site of literary theory, while national literature departments often … remained indifferent to the sorts of theory that did not emanate from their own cultural spheres. (85)

I do not intend to offer an exhaustive disciplinary history, but to indicate what is more or less the consensus about comparative literature’s identity vis-à-vis other forms of literary study. As others before me have argued, its cosmopolitanism comes into crisis with the shift toward a more geographically expansive postcolonialism-cum-transnationalism located primarily within English departments. This challenge of moving from a well-delineated literary geography—identified for a long time mainly with western European and to some degree with Russian traditions—accompanies a shift away from a well-delineated conception of the literary object, writ large.

In practice, African literary studies and comparative literature have existed largely as separate disciplinary spaces. This is not to suggest that Africanists do not undertake comparative work, but that African literary scholarship has not been chiefly concerned with theorizing comparison, as such, and that comparative theory has not focused much on Africa. In this section, however, I will argue that globality as a “solution” for comparative literature and globality as a “problem” for African literary studies derive from two shared and interlinked challenges: establishing comparability without denying power imbalances, and arriving at a sufficiently stable and thus “comparable” object of analysis. The broader discipline’s turn to a global literary paradigm means that would-be comparatists now contend not only with a massive potential archive (quite expressly the whole world) but also with one whose standard of comparability is, paradoxically, either unevenness (à la world systems theory) or mobility/flux. Complicating matters further, the popular solution of a “South-South” comparative framework (that is, one that bypasses the West) goes only partway to signaling a truly de-hierarchized literary field. A fully equalized comparative terrain must at some point be able to account for relations among Western and Southern traditions, and yet this goal comes with considerable baggage vis-à-vis African literary studies especially.²

First, I want to pick up with Culler’s “Whither Comparative Literature?” as part of a larger set of concerns about what, these days, gets compared. After contemplating the benefits and drawbacks of extending literary study to include all cultural objects in all parts of the world (he is in favor of the latter, but not the former), Culler asks, “What, in this newly globalized space, justifies bringing texts together?” (90). His answer is that comparability is determined by a shared discursive terrain, by which he means “a general field that underwrites comparison,” or one text’s “relation to others within a cultural space” (92). In other words, comparison requires some kind of bounded cultural context in order to mobilize textual differences within it. Culler rightly notes that comparative literature now makes strong use of “a general postcolonial context within which comparabilities can be generated” (ibid.). Presumably, African literature would fall within this ambit. In fact, however, this vein of what might now be called “global Anglophone” scholarship is in large part at odds with the defining tensions of African literary studies more specifically. The type of scholarship to which Culler refers—he mentions specifically an Anglophone “hypercanon” of “Rushdie, Achebe, Walcott, Coetzee, etc.” (90)—might be fine for comparing works whose mutual intelligibility hangs on a relation to Western imperialism. But it cannot quite account for how to compare across African texts and contexts that are strategically self-delimiting or exclusive of the West, as has often been the case.

While it does not merit significant space here, it is important therefore to note that the defining tension within African literature is not between “Eurocentric” and “global,” but rather between integrative (or “de-centering”) and oppositional (or perhaps “re-centering”) objectives for African cultural production. This is best captured in decades of critical controversy over “nativism,” which, as Adélékè Adé

k

has usefully described it, functions more successfully as a rhetorical strategy than as a form of genuine cultural reclamation. As Adé

k

suggests, Ngũgĩ’s much-discussed “linguistic nativism” (that is, his insistence on Gikuyu-language literary production) rests uneasily with his historical situation. “All that a self-aware nativist critic can do,” Adé

k

writes, “is to devise general principles based on an interpretation of second order information,” as now-inaccessible precolonial forms are “appropriated for a localist foundation of the emergent post-independence culture” (1998/2007, 236–37). As twenty-first-century literary institutions have rushed to keep pace with the dizzyingly complex, networked condition institutionalized variously as globality, transnationalism, world literature, and the like, the African literary field has spawned ever-new forms of the definitive underlying conflict outlined here. A heated and irresoluble debate over the term “Afropolitanism” is the most prominent example. The novelist Taiye Selasi’s now-iconic 2005 essay “Bye-Bye Babar,” from the defunct online The Lip Magazine, identifies a chic, “scattered tribe of pharmacists, physicists, physicians (and the odd polygamist) [that] has set up camp around the globe,” referring in the main to an exodus of educated Africans to European and American cities after the independence era. In attracting the ire of, most famously, fellow writer Binyavanga Wainaina for its valorization of the privileged diaspora over more emplaced and committed continental citizens, Selasi’s essay sparks what now seems like a period of profound literary-intellectual déjà vu. As regards African literature’s place in the world, then, the discord over Afropolitanism foregrounds a persistent and fundamental division as to whether Africa is best imagined as a site of commerce with the West, or one of continued exploitation by it.

The historical topic of nativism thus bleeds into the more contemporary one of cultural essentialism, and in African literary studies one sees in full force the risks of turning from “text” to “culture.” Following on Adé

k

’s representative skepticism as to the historical dubiousness of cultural reconstruction (whatever its sometimes worthwhile strategic uses), comparatists have often worried over the practical, methodological implications of the cultural turn. Peter Brooks, for example, critiques what he sees as an unjustified call in the American Comparative Literature Association’s 1993 state-of-the-discipline report to turn away from “high literature” in favor of discursive context as stemming from a mistaken view that “the study of literature is an outmoded mandarin practice that had better catch up with the hip world of cultural studies” (99). Moreover, he notes, the report fails to provide “any theory of the practices recommended” in re-forming the discipline as the study of cultural context, risking a replacement of “the study of literature with amateur social history, amateur sociology, and personal ideology” (100). Amid similar fears, Culler’s solution is to orient comparative literature to poetics as “a repertoire of possibilities, forms, themes, [and] discursive practices” (95), which is persuasive in accounting for both limitless comparative combinations, in a geographical sense, and necessarily limited comparative endeavors in a more practical one. In this way, his model is an improvement on an ossified postcolonialism that remains tethered to imperial contact as the grounds by which a common field is established. It is easy to see, however, how more economically attuned critiques of comparative literature might find Culler’s approach wanting. “Comparative literature has always thought about difference,” Haun Saussy writes in his introduction to the volume Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, “but inequality remains foreign to its usual vocabulary.” In a further move toward pitting global economic disparity against comparative literature’s worldly self-conception, Saussy continues, “The more cosmopolitan our reach, the more evident the problem” (2006, 28).

The disciplinary debates that Saussy reviews are by now familiar, revolving, as Culler and Brooks likewise suggest, mainly around tensions between formalistic methods of analysis and a “cultural studies” approach to non-Western bodies of work. What is less often observed in the context of connecting African and comparative literary histories is that Saussy, like others who are sympathetic to developing a more inclusive field of academic comparison, sees postcolonial studies as the primary and most useful “other.” He cites “much postcolonial scholarship (erroneously categorized as special pleading)” as a body of work that has contended with how “the single [global] economy divides up what it unites” (28). Postcolonialism, in other words, is presented as a productive partner to thinking about the “world system.” Saussy extends this line of thinking to his essay in the following state-of-the-discipline report ten years later, published in 2017 as the volume Futures of Comparative Literature. He writes there that “the ambition to write literary histories of regions outside of Europe, showing their internal organization and development—which are often instructively different from what is seen in the European example,” is one antidote to narratives of capital’s global diffusion that have become a rote and accepted form of Western self-critique (26).

What we are left with is a Venn diagram in which African literary studies and comparative literature overlap around the tandem questions of postcolonialism and globalization. And yet this convergence marks a problem space for African literature, and a salvational space for comparison. Whereas postcolonialism has often been seen as a challenge to conceptualizing harder-line forms of de-coloniality within African literary studies, postcolonialism for comparatists augurs a more general geographical expansionism that in effect becomes a “decolonizing” framework. What’s more, seminal debates within the postcolonial field surrounding its diffusive versus agonistic skew—influential work by Neil Lazarus, Peter Hallward, and Vivek Chibber, among others, has mounted strong critiques of mainline postcolonial theory—resound through persistent tensions between world literature and comparative literature.³ Following this line of thought, postcolonialism is a corrective to comparison rather than its next frontier. Writing in The Global South during its first year of publication in 2007, Alfred J. Lopez posits, “The rise of postcolonial studies and related projects has begun to expose [the problem of ‘foreignized’ subaltern texts] in comparative literature, as the latter has only in the past decade started playing a belated game of inclusive multicultural ‘catchup’ in an area in which it has effectively been trumped” (2). Lopez thus believes that “the global South signals the death of a certain kind of comparative literature, because it would undermine the originary exclusion upon which the discipline is founded” (5). And while Natalie Melas has painstakingly presented contradictory evidence for comparative literature’s less Eurocentric nineteenth-century origins in her monograph All the Difference in the World, she also elaborates its racism and overly positivistic methodology.⁴ It thus seems fair here to hew to the “m...