The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts AFRICAN GENRES: LITERATURE, GEOGRAPHY, AND POETICS IN THE LONG EAST COAST A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Michelle G. Decker © 2014 Michelle G. Decker Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2014 The dissertation of Michelle G. Decker was reviewed and approved* by the following: Eric Hayot Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Head of the Department of Comparative Literature Gabeba Baderoon Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and African Studies Jonathan P. Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English Nergis Ertürk Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Christopher Reed Professor of English and Visual Culture *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ABSTRACT African Genres enacts a broad reassessment of academic and popular conceptions of “Africa” through analyzing written literatures from the Long East Coast. It demonstrates how geography, literary form, and interpretive practices interplay to formulate these broad conceptions. As a whole, the work demonstrates how interpretations of African geography affected its place in world history; discusses how the heuristic of genre shapes how Western readers read non-Western texts; and finally, calls for a reimagining of the limits and characteristics of an African poetics. In respective chapters, African Genres enacts close-readings of the form, content, and style of texts written between 1860 and 1970, a time period that intentionally bridges multiple colonialisms (Arab, European, and internal) and postcolonialisms. In this work, Zanzibar (along with the Swahili coast and East African interior), Egypt, and South Africa are the representative locations of the Long East Coast. The Long East Coast is a new theoretical and geographical configuration that combines an unlikely collection of geographies—some of which are not coastal—and an atypical collection of texts from or about those spaces—most of which are not novels—and thereby posits a new theory of what “Africa,” and African literatures could mean. African Genres also proposes a method for reading African literatures that predate or ignore the novel, and for reading novels written by Europeans who lived in the continent. In both cases, the aim is to identify colonial and precolonial texts operating outside European genres, and 2) to compile the aspects of potentially new genres, and, eventually, theorize how such genres could shape our view of literary expression. In African Genres, the texts analyzed include A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster; “Passage to India” (1871) by Walt Whitman; Maisha ya Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, yaani Tippu Tip, by Tippu Tip (1902/1903); Zanzibar; City, Island, and Coast (1872) by Richard Francis Burton; “Funeral for Walt Whitman” (2012) by Abdel Moneim Ramadan; and a selection of South African poetry, including works by Sydney Clouts, Wally Mongane Serote, Douglas Livingstone, and Muthobi Mutloatse. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... vi Introduction. African Genres ................................................................................................................ 1 The Making of “Africa” .................................................................................................................. 3 The Long East Coast and Its Literatures ................................................................................... 10 Genre ............................................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 1. African Interiors, as Told by Tippu Tip and Richard Francis Burton ....................... 25 Burton’s Forms ............................................................................................................................... 34 Tippu Tip’s Interiors...................................................................................................................... 58 A Coda: The River of the Future ................................................................................................. 77 Chapter 2. The Passage by Egypt: Whitman and Forster’s Suez Canal. ........................................ 84 A Doubled Passage to India ......................................................................................................... 95 Forster’s Passage: A Poem in the Present Continuous ........................................................... 107 Chapter 3. Grey Aesthetics: Apartheid South African Poetry between Politics and Form ...... 137 White Aesthetics / Black Politics .............................................................................................. 148 Grey Aesthetics ............................................................................................................................ 168 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................................... 188 --vi-- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Beneath each polished page of this dissertation are strata of castoff ones that, finally, at some moment of unknown and never-to-be-known thickness, settled, sighed, and allowed what now remains. Standing on this side of composition, and on this side of graduate school, I feel somewhat like I imagine this piece of writing would feel, if it could: held up by a thousand small labors that are both its own and never completely so. I thus acknowledge those labors and laborers, who have toiled alongside, before, and for me. I’m grateful for a supportive and functional committee whose members—Gabeba Baderoon, Jonathan Eburne, Nergis Ertürk, Christopher Reed, and my advisor, Eric Hayot— individually and collectively shaped not just this dissertation, but also my scholarly method as a whole. When I took Jonathan Eburne’s senior seminar on literary theory as an undergraduate, I was introduced to someone who practiced equally enthusiastic and brilliant teaching and literary criticism. Thanks to his example and persistence, I now present my ideas in positive terms. Many conversations about academic life and African literature with Gabeba Baderoon helped to reignite my curiosity and enthusiasm for my project when, during the haul, it flagged. Nergis Ertürk’s anticolonialism seminar and her suggestion to leave India out of the project, for now, saved me much time and frustration. And Christopher Reed’s careful reading and incisive comments on every chapter helped me transform the original “final” chapters into the much better ones you’ll read next. He did --vii-- you, the reader, and me a great favor in urging me to rethink and rewrite those earlier versions. It was because he was trained as a Chinese historian, said Martin Bernal, that he could write Black Athena, a book that would challenge dearly held truths about the foundations of Greek civilization. An outsider can see things that those inside cannot, due to the sheer fact of perspective, and that they have not been trained to ignore the obvious questions. I wasn’t trained as a Chinese historian, and I can barely hope that African Genres will have the longevity and effect of Black Athena. However, I was trained by someone who knows an awful lot about China and helped me to see and trust that the obvious questions that I asked about African and postcolonial studies were worthwhile, and pushed me to write and revise (again), until the result was a worthy response to those questions. The good paragraph structure and little jokes; the boldness and ambition; the argumentative method and mode of reading observable in and constitutive of this dissertation are because of Eric Hayot’s tireless mentorship. Thank you for teaching me so well, and for telling me, as often as I needed to hear it, that you were proud of me and certain of my abilities. In many ways, I’ve grown up as a scholar while in the Department of Comparative Literature at Penn State. That I’ve turned out okay is in large part due to Caroline Eckhardt’s vision for the department, in assembling a faculty whose members have that rare combination of intellect and kindness, and in recruiting graduate students who have served as examples and comrades. It’s also largely because of Dr. Eckhardt’s zeal for the discipline of comparative literature in all its forms that I have become the teacher and writer that I am. Through the Department of Comparative Literature’s travel support, I attended conferences where I grew tremendously as a scholar. The department also funded my trip to --viii-- Tanzania to study Kiswahili in the summer of 2008, a trip that facilitated my interest in the Indian Ocean region, and planted the seeds for this dissertation. While at Penn State, I was fortunate to receive a summer residency fellowship at Institute for the Arts and Humanities, a dissertation fellowship at the Africana Research Center, and travel grants and awards from the Penn State Graduate School for research trips to Northwestern University and to South Africa (and the University of the Witwatersrand). If you tunnel down far enough in the strata of African Genres, you may be able to find the impact crater that registers the rise and fall of a marriage, and the missteps and triumphs of building a new life. To those friends