From Empire to Independence:Colonial Space in the Writing of Tutuola, Ekwensi, Beti and Kane

Abstract This article examines the production of space in four early Anglophone and Francophone West African novels, reading Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Nigeria, 1952), Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (Nigeria, 1954), Mongo Beti's Mission terminée (Cameroon, 1957), and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë (Senegal, 1961) alongside broader social, political, and economic spatial discourses from the 1950s and 1960s. By so doing, the article unpacks the articulated correspondences between literary space and its wider materiality in ways that are both explicit and implicit. Drawing on insights from human geography, this essay explores the extent to which the distinct spatial programs of the British and French empires manifest within Anglophone and Francophone West African writing in the years leading to independence, ultimately arguing that the latter displays a range of discrepant, horizontal formulations in contrast to the more monolithic, vertical spatiality of the latter.</jats:p

Affiliation, Disavowal and National Commitment in Third Generation African Literature

This paper examines the construction of national commitment in third generation African literature through a comparative reading of Binyavanga Wainaina’s literary memoir, One Day I Will Write about this Place, Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance. In each text, the relationship between the individual and his or her nation of origin cannot be reduced to a simple dyadic term, reflecting the multiply-articulated imagined communities in which individual lives exist and the (re)doubled workings of filiation, affiliation and disavowal at play in contemporary Africa. Like the nations which comprise the continent, then, the idea of the nation in the contemporary African literary work is both variable and shifting, responding to its immediate circumstances and demonstrating the potency of novel paradigms of belonging. Nationalism, like the nation, thus reflects a deep ambivalence which mobilizes multiple affiliations and, nevertheless, does not preclude belonging and commitment. Rather than dismiss the nation, as category, I argue that Wainaina’s, Vera’s and Nwaubani’s works present a vision of nationness which exceeds any unitary definition, demonstrating the boundlessness of constructions of belonging as well as the critical simultaneity of shifting and conflicting affiliations. This reconfigured relationship to the nation is itself reflective of the inherent variability of the African nation, one which contains within it the scope of multiple and conflicting paradigms of belonging

Of Masquerades and Mimicry: Performance, Identity, and Tradition in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames

This article considers the interaction between mimricy and masquerade in Chris Abani's 2007 novel, The Virgin of Flames, viewing this play of performances as a means of destabilizing the notion of tradition in the construction of an idea of African subjectivity. Focusing on the protagonist, Black's use of cross-dressing and white-face, this article considers the ways in which the of drag-as-masquerade, engaging in the liberatory discourses of perfromativity in identity construction, is re-routed through the intrusion of drag-as-masquerade, read as a deferred desire for ontological stability. Through the rooting of performance in tradition and the routing of tradition through performance, The Virgin of Flames, this article agrues, creates a vision of tradition in African literatures which escapes a singular conception and challenges polemic notions of "authenticity" and "authority", while also presenting a rebuttal to critical dismissals of the novel as one with little to say about Africa and African experience

Writing Africa under the Cold War:Arrested Decolonisation and Geopolitical Integration

In a 2000 interview, novelist Ahmadou Kourouma notes the correspondence between the dawning of the Cold War and the development of independence movements across Africa. For Kourouma, the former is notable for its strategic positioning of newly independent African nations as allies aligned to one or other of the superpowers in a relationship that he characterises as a new imperialism. Reading novels from West, Central and East Africa, including work by Kourouma, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o and Alain Mabanckou, this chapter traces the ways in which literary writing has articulated the tensions accompanying this intertwined relationship between arrested decolonisation, post-independence malaise and the subjugation of the continent within the matrix of the Cold War

Podcasting as Activism and/or Entrepreneurship:Cooperative Networks, Publics and African Literary Production

This is the final version. Available on open access from the Modern Language Association via the link in this recor