Routledge Handbook of African Literature
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Routledge Handbook of African Literature The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to Afri- can literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. The handbook is divided into seven parts: i) Mapping political agencies, ii) Journeys, geo- graphies, identities, iii) Working through genre, iv) The world of and beyond humans, v) Everyday sociality, vi) Bodies, subjectivities, affect, vii) Literary networks. In each, contributors address the themes of the section from a variety of perspectives in conjunction with analysis of different literary texts. All chapters are original research essays written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Moradewun Adejunmobi is Professor of African Studies in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis, USA. She has published widely on Francophone African literature, multilingualism and translation in African literature and cinema, as well as on Nollywood and the Nigerian film industry. Carli Coetzee is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the Editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies. Routledge Handbook of African Literature Edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 4, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 4 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adejunmobi, Moradewun, editor. | Coetzee, Carli, editor. Title: Routledge handbook of African literature / edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018049132 (print) | LCCN 2018050654 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315229546 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781351859387 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9781351859370 ( Epub) | ISBN 9781351859363 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9781138713864 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: African literature–21st century–History and criticism. | African literature–20th century–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR9340 (ebook) | LCC PR9340 .R68 2019 (print) | DDC 820.996–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049132 ISBN: 978-1-138-71386-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22954-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books Contents List of contributors ix 1 Introduction 1 Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee PART I Mapping Political Agencies 19 2 ‘Children of the Cold War’: Rethinking African literary generations through the global conflict 21 Monica Popescu 3 Ethics and the politics of the ordinary in African literature 35 Chielozona Eze 4 Globalisation, mobility and labour in African diasporic fiction 47 Anna-Leena Toivanen 5 Towards an ethics of the humanitarian imagination 60 Allison Mackey PART II Journeys, Geographies, Identities 73 6 Decolonising the Afropolitan: Intra-African migrations in post-2000 literature 75 Rebecca Fasselt 7 History, imperial eyes and the ‘mutual gaze’: Narratives of African-Chinese encounters in recent literary works 92 Ying Cheng v Contents 8 Ethnicity in post-2000 African writing 110 Aghogho Akpome 9 Mythopoesis of the self: Nation, textuality and the writer as political hero 124 Rotimi Fasan PART III Working through Genres 137 10 How to be a writer in your 30s in Lagos: Self-help literature and the creation of authority in Africa 139 Rebecca Jones 11 Gothic supernaturalism in the ‘African imagination’: Locating an emerging form 154 Rebecca Duncan 12 Contested filial voice in African female-authored autobiographies 170 Marciana Nafula Were 13 ‘I can’t go forward; I must go back’: Ben Okri’s (p)anachronistic utopias 186 Ian P. MacDonald PART IV The World of and beyond Humans 201 14 African literature, audience and the search for the (non)human 203 Cajetan Iheka 15 Dirty ecology: African women and the ethics of cultivation 215 Sarah L. Lincoln 16 African fictions, animal figures and anthropocentric frameworks 231 Jesse Arseneault 17 Depictions of Kenyan lands and landscapes by four women writers 244 Ng’ang’a Muchiri vi Contents PART V Everyday Sociality 259 18 Geopolitical and global topologies in fiction: Islam at the fault lines in Africa and the world 261 Shirin Edwin 19 Appetite and everyday life in African literature 276 Delores B. Phillips 20 ‘Foundational fictions’: Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa’s early Anglophone-Igbo novels 290 F. Fiona Moolla 21 Drinking scenes: Alcohol in the Francophone African novel 305 Pim Higginson PART VI Bodies, Subjectivities, Affect 321 22 Desire and freedom in Yvonne Vera’s fiction 323 Grace A. Musila 23 The forms of shame and African literature 339 Naminata Diabate 24 Scattered testimony: Locating the Rwandan genocide in transnational witnessing 354 Martina Kopf 25 Contestations through same-sex desire in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu 369 Edgar F. Nabutanyi PART VII Literary Networks 383 26 The Story Club: African literary networks offline 385 Stephanie Bosch Santana 27 Language and prizes: Exploring literary and cultural boundaries 399 Doseline Kiguru vii Contents 28 Publishers’ networks and the making of African literature: Locating communities of readers and writers 413 Kate Wallis 29 Literary networks in the Horn of Africa: Oromo and Amharic intellectual histories 429 Sara Marzagora and Ayele Kebede Index 443 viii Contributors Moradewun Adejunmobi is Professor of African Studies in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. She has published widely on Fran- cophone African literature, multilingualism and translation in African literature and cinema, as well as on Nollywood and the Nigerian film industry. She is the author of J. J. Rabearivelo, Literature, and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar (1996) and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local in Non-Native Languages in West Africa (2004). Aghogho Akpome currently lectures in the Department of English, University of Zululand. His research interests include literary (re)historicisation, culture criticism, narratives of identity/ difference and nation (especially within postcolonial literatures), literary representations of migration as well as African studies more broadly. Jesse Arseneault is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where he teaches in the field of global Anglophone literatures. His primary research interests consider the place of animality in African literary, cultural and scholarly production, high- lighting both the place of animals in these fields and the effects of colonialism’s campaigns of animalisation on the African human. Typically revolving around South African post-apartheid literary and cultural texts, his research also explores themes from postcolonial studies, cultural studies, queer theory, posthumanism and globalisation studies. Ayele Kebede is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS University of London. His PhD is the first full-length study comparing Oromo and Amharic literary traditions. His research stresses the importance of multilingual methodologies in the study of world literature and contributes to the ERC-funded project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies (MULOSIGE). Before he moved to London, Ayele was a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bule Hora University, Ethiopia. Stephanie Bosch Santana is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University