Fredric. 2013. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso.
21 Jeyifo, Biodun. 2004. Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22 Julien, Eileen. 2006. “The Extroverted African Novel.” In The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 667–700.
23 Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
24 Moretti, Franco. 1987. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso.
25 Mutua, Makau. 2002. Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
26 Ndebele, Njabulo S. 1986. “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, no. 2. 143–157.
27 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
28 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: J. Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
29 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1997. Writers in Politics: A Re‐engagement with Issues of Literature and Society. Oxford: J. Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
30 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 2012. Weep Not, Child (1964). New York: Penguin Books.
31 Slaughter, Joseph R. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press.
32 Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1992. “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.” In Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams. Revised edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Notes
1 1 See Irele (1990). Irele argues that a critical examination of African literature necessarily raises the question of its distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from other literatures. See also Irele (2001).
2 2 Arabic colonization long predates European colonization in Eastern Africa, resulting in a vibrant literary culture, especially poetry, initially in Arabic but later in Swahili language, that survives to date. The Swahili‐language novel, for example, is among the most highly developed African‐language novelistic traditions in the continent.
3 3 See Desai (2001).
4 4 What constitutes East or, better still, Eastern Africa is still subject to debate but there is a general agreement that Ethiopia is part of this geopolitical configuration. Ethiopia has a very long history of writing. The debate as to whether Swahili is an indigenous language is now definitively settled.
5 5 See Boldrini and Davies (2004).
6 6 See especially Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s three most influential works: Writers in Politics, Moving the Center, and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. No other writer or critic has mounted a more sustained case for reading African literature ideologically than Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
7 7 See Andrews and McGuire (2016).
8 8 For fuller discussion of the characteristics, norms, and contexts of the European Bildungsroman, see Moretti (1987).
9 9 Boes (2006, 235). On colonial ideology in Africa, see Mamdani (1996, 3–6).
10 10 The classical normative Bildungsroman by its nature is evolutionary and providentiary, with narrative progression mirroring the psychological and social growth of the individual gesturing toward eventual mutual accommodation between the society and individual. But there are what Jameson in “The Experiment of Time” (2006, 101) calls intermediate steps which collapse the destiny of the individual with that of the social collective.
11 11 It’s ironic to think of the colonial world as objective. For a thorough critique of the discourse of human rights, human personality development, and the Bildungsroman, see Slaughter.
12 12 Amoko here echoes and modifies two famous essays, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.” In his provocative argument, he terms Arnold and Levis’ nationalist attempts to institutionalize literature intentional fallacy, that is the idea that literature must always be in tandem with nationalist sentiments.
13 13 The atrocities committed by the British army in Kenya were not peculiar. In Southern Africa, they were preceded by the near extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples of present‐day Namibia, then known as South West Africa, by the Germans.
3 Of Authenticity and Engagement in Francophone African Cultural Production
Brian Valente‐Quinn
A clear‐eyed assessment of the shortcomings and disciplinary blind spots of the study of Francophone African literature would need to reckon with the degree to which the field perpetuates what Valentin Mudimbe memorably called the “invention” of Africa. In asking what is behind the “knowledge” that we now profess to have regarding Africa, Mudimbe concludes that our understanding of the continent rests upon “a silent dependence on a Western episteme,” or modes of knowledge deeply rooted in ethnocentric, anthropological approaches (Mudimbe 1988, x). Understandings of the historical “underdevelopment” of Africa are frequently set along dichotomous categorizations, leading readers of African literature to consider the traditional and the modern, or the oral and the written as mutually exclusive concepts, often with the implied assumption that the continent is slowly working its way from the former to the latter. In fact, our point of departure in the study of Francophone African literature tends to exclude what lies beyond the boundaries of our limited categories. This exclusion has doubly blinded readers and scholars, first by privileging cultural forms that emerged by way of the colonial encounter. Secondly, the field of Francophone African studies can often mislead the reader or student by focusing solely on works that have passed through European or North American hubs of publishing or distribution. As literary scholar Maëline Le Lay points out in her study on Swahili literary and theatrical production in the Democratic Republic of Congo: “Si le dynamisme de ces écrivains dits ‘francophones’ a le mérite d’avoir fait connaître cette littérature sur la scène littéraire européenne, il a aussi eu pour effet de concentrer le regard du public sur l’écriture des Africains en diaspora. Le lecteur lambda d’aujourd’hui croit ainsi connaître la ‘littérature africaine’ alors qu’il ignore tout ou presque de l’activité littéraire réelle sur le continent africain” (While the dynamism of these so‐called ‘Francophone’ writers has the merit of bringing this literature to light on the European literary scene, it has also had the effect of focusing the public’s attention on writing by diasporic Africans. Today’s average readers will therefore believe they know about ‘African literature,’ when they know nearly nothing about the real literary activity taking place on the African continent).