Orality and Authorship: African storyteller-authors in the literary marketplace 1938-2024

Abstract

This thesis examines how African writers, whose work is connected both to oral storytelling and to written literature, navigate the collision of these two conflicting systems. There is an inherent tension between the dynamics of oral tradition, which is communal, intangible and in flux, and the underpinning logic of literary production, which seeks to create standardised texts with stable identifiable origins. I contend that writers who transpose the practices and tenets of oral tradition into the literary sphere, unsettle and defamiliarise the entrenched ideological foundations of contemporary modes of literary creation and publication. This thesis therefore theorises a hybrid artistic identity, the "storyteller-author," to provide an analytical category for writers who bring a storyteller's sensibility to the institutions of authorship. Considering its focus on questions of ownership, originality and artistic hierarchies, this work is critically engaged with the fields of world literature, postcolonial studies and book history, and particularly with scholars working at the intersection of these disciplines (Karin Barber, Sarah Brouillette, Gail Low, Madhu Krishnan, Joseph Slaughter). Methodologically, it also combines close readings with forms of institutional analysis, at times drawing on archival research, in order to remain attentive to how the presence of orality in these author's works is informed by and in conversation with their specific context of textual production. Chapter 1 examines how the Yorùbá language writer D.O. Fágúnwà (1903-1963) foregrounds modes of re-telling and communal exchange in his work, developing a form of authorship that conceives of narrative as encountered rather than created. This reading is situated within the contemporary context of missionary "literature work," to consider how this cultural environment influenced Fágúnwà's authorial self-construction. In Chapter 2, I trace how Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) interacted with three key literary institutions throughout his career, namely the publisher, the archive and the university. In this, I demonstrate how, by approaching these institutions from a storyteller's perspective, he exposes and unsettles the foundational principles of these spaces. Chapter 3 is focused on the novels of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (1967-present): Kintu (2014) and The First Woman (2020), which reveal how oral storytelling can contribute to the conceptual construction of an egalitarian mode of Afropolitanism. In Chapter 4, I turn to a consideration of the relationship between oral tradition and indigenous ontology, examining how Akwaeke Emezi (1987-present) approaches orality as a "spiritfirst" medium of expression, integrating its dynamics into their artistic practice and authorial mode. Finally, in Chapter 5, I identify how the figure of the storyteller has re-emerged in three mediums of secondary orality: AI-generated African folktales on Youtube, African folklore podcasts and spoken word poetry. Through this, I consider how the storyteller-author, as both an artistic category and mode of reading, can provide a critical framework for analysing transitory and multimodal forms of verbal art which are increasingly prominent in the contemporary cultural landscape