African Literatures as World Literature

Alexander Fyfe, Madhu Krishnan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501379994
• eBook ISBN: 9781501379963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: African literatures and the problem of ‘the world’
• 2 ‘African borders are unnatural’: Nairobi and the rise of a world literature
• 3 Can Nairobi ‘world’ without the ‘great Kenyan novel’?
• 4 The problem with French and the world: Imagining the province and the global in francophone African fiction
• 5 The first Ethiopian novel in Amharic (1908) and the world: Critical and theoretical legacies
• 6 The Kaiser, Angoche and the world at large: Swahili poetry from Mozambique as world (war) literature
• 7 Early Sesotho, isiXhosa and isiZulu novels as world literature
• 8 African multilingualism as an asset in world literature: A case against cultural conformity and uniformity
• 9 New cartographies for world literary space: Locating pan-African publishing and prizing
• 10 Aké Festival and the African world stage
• 11 Contemporary African literature and celebrity capital
• 12 Reversing the global media lens: Colonial spectacularization in the writing of Binyavanga Wainaina
• 13 The facts at the heart of the matter: Character and objectivity in the making of the Fante Intelligentsia
• Index
• Copyright Page