Introduction 1
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Notes Introduction 1. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlight- enment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 47. 2. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 70. 3. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 70. 4. For a discussion of the relationship between the genre of romance and European nationalism see, for example, Marlon B. Ross, “Romancing the Nation-State: The Poetic of Romantic Nationalism,” Macropoli- tics of Nineteenth-Century Literature, eds Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 56–85. 5. Carol Sicherman, “Revolutionizing the Literature Curriculum at the University of East Africa: Literature and the Soul of the Nation,” Research in African Literatures 29.3 (1998), 125. 6. Biodun Jeyifo, “The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical Theory,” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (1990), 43. 7. The key texts include Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy,ed. Samuel Lipmann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), and F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969) and The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: New York University Press, 1963). 8. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 19. 9. James Ngugi, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban lo Liyong, “On the Abolition of the English Department,” Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, ed. James Ngugi (London: Heinemann, 1972), 145. 10. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 145. 11. Quoted in, “On the Abolition,” 145. 12. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 145. 13. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 145. 14. Quoted in, “On the Abolition,” 145–46. 15. Leavis, English Literature,3. 16. Leavis, English Literature,8. 17. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146. 180 Notes 18. Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 234 (footnote 26). 19. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146. 20. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146. 21. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 89–90. 22. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146. 23. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146. 24. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146. Ngugi’s positions are more complex than this “snapshot” reading suggests. In his later work, he would become sharply critical of the role of the university in the neocolonial exploitation of Kenya. See, for example, my reading of Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross. Also, Ngugi’s Afrocentricism was tempered by his commitment to Marxism. In “The Robber and the Robbed” (Writers in Politics [London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981], 123–39), to cite one example, Ngugi defines literature in terms not of race but of imperialism. He suggests that literary value be defined in terms of a global struggle against imperialism and capi- talism. According to this argument, there is a fundamental connection between the African proletariat and peasantry and the working people of Asia and Latin America. But see also “Europhonism, Universities and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Schol- arship,” Research in African Literature 31.1 (Spring 2000), 1–11. In this essay, Ngugi attempts to define all the disciplines, not just the literature department, of an Afrocentric university. 25. Angus Calder, “Africanisation of the Curriculum,” Internal Memo- rumdum, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, 6 June 1971. 26. Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), xii. 27. Hountondji, African Philosophy, 33. 28. Hountondji, African Philosophy, 66. 29. Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition,” 146–47. 30. Simon Gikandi, “African Literature and the Social Science Paradigm,” paper commissioned by the Social Science Research Council, New York, 25. 31. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 38. 32. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 50. 33. Kenneth Kaunda, “Addresses at the Installation” quoted in J. F. Ade Ajayi, Lameck K. H. Goma, and G. Ampah Johnson, The African Experience with Higher Education (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996), 1. 34. Ajayi et al., The African Experience,1. 35. Ajayi et al., The African Experience,1. Notes 181 36. Ajayi et al., The African Experience,1. 37. For an instructive set of interviews with many of these pioneering writers recalling their heady student days at Ibadan, see Robert Wren, Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan 1948–1966 (Washington, D. C.: Three Continents Press, 1991). 38. F. Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 173. 39. Irele, The African Imagination, 173. 40. Irele, The African Imagination, 175. 41. Irele, The African Imagination, 175. 42. Irele, The African Imagination, 175–76. 43. Irele, The African Imagination, 181. 44. Irele, The African Imagination, 176. 45. Irele, The African Imagination, 181. 46. Irele, The African Imagination, 181. 47. The phrase “homogenous, empty time,” is taken from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a text that I address in greater detail in what follows. 48. Irele, The African Imagination, 177. 49. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 209. 50. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 210. 51. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 209. 52. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 209. 53. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 209. 54. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 223. 55. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 225. 56. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116.1 (January 2001), 174. 57. Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 174. Chapter 1 1. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, 69 (Fall 1986), 69. 2. Simon Gikandi, “African Literature and the Social Science Paradigm,” unpublished manuscript, 28. 3. André-Paul Michaud, “Nature as Agency in Ngugi’s The River Between,” Critical Essays on Ngug˜ ˜ı wa Thiong’o, ed. Peter Nazareth (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000), 49. 4. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between (London: Heinemann, 1965), 1. Subsequent references to this edition will be included parentheti- cally in the body of my text. 5. Michaud, “Nature as Agency,” 49. 182 Notes 6. Ato Sekyi-Otu, “The Refusal of Agency: The Founding Narrative and Waiyaki Tragedy in The River Between,” Research in African Literatures 16.2 (1985), 159. 7. Sekyi-Otu, “Refusal of Agency,” 159–60. 8. Homi K. Bhabha, “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Examination of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” Theory of Reading,ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 97. 9. Sekyi-Otu, “Refusal of Agency,” 167. 10. Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66. 11. Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 238. 12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 228. 13. Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 61. 14. Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 62. 15. Gikandi, “African Literature,” 19. Gikandi suggests that Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya was the mediating text between Malinowski and Ngugi. 16. Gikandi, “African Literature,” 19. 17. Sekyi-Otu, “Refusal of Agency,” 173. 18. Sekyi-Otu, “Refusal of Agency,” 172. 19. Sekyi-Otu, “Refusal of Agency,” 172. 20. Quoted in Reinhardt Sander and Ian Munro, “Tolstoy in Africa: An Interview with Ngugi wa Thiong’o,” Critical Perspectives on Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ed. G. D. Killam (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984), 52. 21. Quoted in Sander and Munro, “Tolstoy in Africa,” 52. 22. For a comprehensive historical account of the brutality of British rule during the state of emergency in late colonial Kenya, see Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). 23. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child (London: Heinemann, 1964), 25–6. Subsequent references to this edition will be included paren- thetically in the body of my text. 24. G. D. Killam, “Weep Not, Child,” Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ed. Peter Nazareth (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000), 64–5. 25. Killam, “Weep Not, Child,” 65. 26. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 18. 27. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 24. 28. Anderson, Imagined Communities,7. 29. Anderson, Imagined Communities,7. 30. Anderson, Imagined Communities,7. Notes 183 31. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 121–2. 32. Sekyi-Otu, “Refusal of Agency,” 167. 33. James Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 111. 34. Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels, 111. 35. Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels, 111. 36. For a decisive repudiation of the figure of the unimpeachably innocent child, see Lee Edelman, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer The- ory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” Narrative 6.1(January 1998), 18–30. Edelman writes: Historically constructed [ ...] to serve as the figural repository for sentimentalized cultural identifications, the child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and been enshrined as the figure for whom that order must be held in perpetual trust. The image itself, however, in its coercive universalization, works to discipline political discourse by consigning it always to accede in advance to the reality of a collective futurity whose fig- urative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. (20–1) Drawing on Edelman’s arguments, I suggest that the image of Mwihaki and Njoroge (and indeed that of Njoroge and Stephen) as the innocent embodiments of the ideal postcolonial social order must be contested for its coercive universalizing of a denuded social order. Chapter 2 1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood, First American Edition (New York: E.