African Literatures as World Literature: : Literatures as World Literature Alexander Fyfe Bloomsbury Academic

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 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.

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: African Literatures and the Problem of 'the World'
Alexander Fyfe (University of Georgia, USA) and Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol, UK)
2. 'African Borders Are Unnatural': Nairobi and the Rise of a World Literature
Bhakti Shringarpure (University of Connecticut, USA)
3. Can Nairobi 'World' without the 'Great Kenyan Novel'?
Billy Kahora (University of Bristol, UK)
4. The Problem with French and the World: Imagining the Province and the Global in Francophone African Fiction
Sarah Arens (University of Liverpool, UK)
5. The First Ethiopian Novel in Amharic (1908) and the World: Critical and Theoretical Legacies
Sara Marzagora (King's College London, UK)
6. The Kaiser, Angoche and the World at Large: Swahili Poetry from Mozambique as World (War) Literature
Clarissa Vierke (University of Bayreuth, Germany) and Chapane Mutiua (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique)
7. Early Sesotho, isiXhosa and isiZulu Novels as World Literature
Ashleigh Harris (Uppsala University, Sweden)
8. African Multilingualism as an Asset in World Literature: A Case against Cultural Conformity and Uniformity
Munyao Kilolo (Writer, Editor and Journalist, Kenya)
9. New Cartographies for World Literary Space: Locating Pan-African Publishing and Prizing
Zamda R. Geuza (University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) and Kate Wallis (University of Exeter, UK)
10. Aké Festival and the African World Stage
Lola Shoneyin (Poet and Novelist, Nigeria)
11. Contemporary African Literature and Celebrity Capital
Doseline Kiguru (University of Bristol, UK)
12. Reversing the Global Media Lens: Colonial Spectacularization in the Writing of Binyavanga Wainaina
Penny Cartwright (University of Bristol, UK)
13. The Facts at the Heart of the Matter: Character and Objectivity in the Making of the Fante Intelligentsia
Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Index

Product details

Published	01 Dec 2022
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	284
ISBN	9781501379956
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions	229 x 152 mm
Series	Literatures as World Literature
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

This exciting volume provides an opportunity to recalibrate the study of world literature from the rich ensemble that is African letters. It is well researched, covers a broad range of themes and texts, and produces brilliant, innovative interpretations of literary texts and textual histories. Featuring the work of some of the leading scholars and practitioners of African literature, the volume is imaginatively progressive and conceptually ambitious.

Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English, Yale University, US, and author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018)
With its strong argumentation and concentrated analysis of African literary writing invested in worldliness, critical significance and aesthetics, this work disrupts and challenges monolithic definitions of the world-literature canopy. Readers and scholars will find this edited anthology positioning and rebooting dynamic discussions on African literary discourses, theoretical interventions and world literary space.

Shilpa Daithota Bhat, Assistant Professor of English, National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar Campus, India
African Literatures as World Literature brings together a series of essays that make visible the richness and complexity of world-making in literatures from across the African continent. Considering a plurality of literary forms and languages, as well as texts from a broad range of time periods, this invaluable collection challenges us to new understandings of both African literatures and world literature. Attuned to literary forms of world-making as well as the material networks in which literary practices are implicated, the essays open fresh and exciting perspectives on African literatures beyond conventionalized paradigms. Major achievements of this remarkable collection are its consideration of the variety of literary practices across different media as well as its rigorous engagement with literatures in non-Europhone African languages. Persistently ground-breaking, the volume presents a new archive and fresh, locally grounded categories for the study of world literature. The nuanced case studies and the bold conceptual interventions make this volume a must-read for anyone interested in world literature.

Birgit Neumann, Professor of English Literature and Anglophone Studies, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany