African Literatures as World Literature

Description

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 questions of literary form–realism, oral epic, lyric poetry–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. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Figures Contributors 1 Introduction: African literatures and the problem of ‘the world’ (Alexander Fyfe and Madhu Krishnan) 2 ‘African borders are unnatural’: Nairobi and the rise of a world literature (Bhakti Shringarpure) 3 Can Nairobi ‘world’ without the ‘great Kenyan novel’? (Billy Kahora) 4 The problem with French and the world: Imagining the province and the global in francophone African fiction (Sarah Arens 5 The first Ethiopian novel in Amharic (1908) and the world: Critical and theoretical legacies (Sara Marzagora) 6 The Kaiser, Angoche and the world at large: Swahili poetry from Mozambique as world (war) literature (Clarissa Vierke a 7 Early Sesotho, isiXhosa and isiZulu novels as world literature (Ashleigh Harris) 8 African multilingualism as an asset in world literature: A case against cultural conformity and uniformity (Munyao Kilolo 9 New cartographies for world literary space: Locating pan-African publishing and prizing (Zamda R. Geuza and Kate Wall 10 Aké Festival and the African world stage (Lola Shoneyin) 11 Contemporary African literature and celebrity capital (Doseline Kiguru) 12 Reversing the global media lens: Colonial spectacularization in the writing of Binyavanga Wainaina (Penny Cartwright) 13 The facts at the heart of the matter: Character and objectivity in the making of the Fante Intelligentsia (Jeanne-Marie Index