History of the In-Between: World Literature and the Contemporary African Novel

The African novel has had an uneasy relationship with world literature, but a way to locate the historical novel in world literature lies in the emphatic turn of African fiction to the historical novel. Positing a temporality of a decolonization not yet achieved, the contemporary African novel returns to the particulars of national histories to explain change that has remained unacknowledged or misrepresented for political reasons. It grapples with the writing of history as a conscious process of what Edward W. Said describes as “textualization”: a narration that stresses voice and style in order to convey the particularity of historical circumstance, not as reportage but as lived experience. The world making of world literature comes into play as historical becoming revealed in the retrospective account conscious of the conditions of its own telling.

African Fiction and Philosophy

Though the two fields have rarely been put in conversation, African philosophy and African fiction share a set of foundational concerns. These include the relation of the individual to the community; the significance of culture to unseating exclusively Western universalisms; and the tension between “lived” and a priori claims to truth against a background of political and epistemological decolonization. In addition to this substantive thematic core, both fields have also been shaped by an acute and even anguished degree of self-definitional questioning. What is “African” about African philosophy, or about the African novel? And inversely, what is fundamental to philosophy or the novel as such? Orality has served in both fields as a means of gauging the relative knowledge value afforded experience, on the one hand, and ideas’ formal contestation, on the other. While strong advocates of orality as a distinguishing feature of African intellectual production have extolled its collective dimensions, critics have been wary of its potential for cultural reductiveness and essentialism. Textuality, some argue, is an epistemological orientation that exceeds the literal practice of writing, and need not be viewed as a historical development at odds with African knowledge traditions. A number of influential African philosophers have homed in on the related problem of individualism in an effort to differentiate philosophical from social-scientific claims. This makes African philosophy an ideal interlocutor for African novel studies, which has sought in its own right to reconcile the form’s historical premium on the individual with African social contexts. While countless African novels from the mid-20th century to the early 21st century represent the challenge of negotiating between collective and individual as well as oral and textual elements, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s masterwork Kintu is an exemplary study in how the subgenre of the “philosophical novel” can narrativize the interaction of different African knowledge paradigms. In its staging of an oral, embodied system of knowledge alongside a textualized, meta-epistemological one, it invites the reader’s mutual evaluation of each vis-à-vis the other.

Repeating Authorial Blackface in Analogous Adaptation of Probably Ghostwritten The Dark Child

After decades of investigation, leading scholars conclude that the founding novel of francophone African literature was likely written by Europeans. Camara Laye’s The Dark Child (1953) was sold as an autobiography and became the most read African novel in French. The idyllic narrative that African critics accused of colonial apologetics is now accused by Western scholars of being the product of an anti-independence conspiracy supported by François Mitterrand. When claims of ghost-writing were still dismissed as petty African jealousy, Laurent Chevallier relocated Laye’s childhood story to present-day Guinea with an analogous film adaptation that both builds on and parallels the novel. The French director introduces L’enfant noir (1995) not as his own interpretation but that of Laye’s relatives who also act in his film. Although Chevallier sells his story as authentically local, his Eurocentric adaptation of gender, polygamy, and reproduction has provoked accusations of Western plotting against African values.

Narrating the Struggle, Theorizing the Genre: The Convergence of Narrative and Literary-Critical Theory in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

This article explores Achebe’s insertion of literary-theoretical discourse into traditional narrative space in Anthills of the Savannah with a view to demonstrating part of the limitless possibilities that the continental African novel pulsates with. It evokes the coexistence of narrative and literary-theoretical discourse in this particular novel through critical focus on selected characters’ reflections on the place and role of the story and the storyteller in society, the entanglement of the story and the storyteller in political, cultural, and social issues, and the storyteller’s freedom to imagine the contours of the story in keeping with cherished political, cultural, economic, and social priorities in African societies. Admittedly, Achebe addresses some of these issues in his literary-critical texts, but scholars of the continental African novel still have to contend with the ways in which continental African novelists utilize narrative space to theorize the novel as a genre. To that end, this article avers that Achebe’s innovative co-optation of literary-theoretical issues into the narrative interstices of Anthills of the Savannah is exemplary in the development of both the continental African novel and literary-theoretical criteria that are instructive in the interpretation of this canon from an Afrocentric perspective.