Nuruddin Farah: A pas de deux across The World Republic of Letters

Nuruddin Farah’s life and work is used in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters to exemplify the challenges of the dispossessed writer on the periphery of the hierarchical, binary, and highly agonistic world literary system she describes. However, precisely because of his unique position on the Somali literary periphery of the African periphery, Farah’s work and career represent the practice of Casanova’s theory in advance of its formulation. The Somali writer’s negotiation of entry into the dominant world literary order since the publication of his first novel in 1970 suggests an implicit understanding of the literary system Casanova outlines only towards the end of the twentieth century. In other words, Farah does not derivatively illustrate the theory, but his career and novels preempt through practice the major insights of Casanova’s theory. Farah’s career, furthermore, suggests a wider polycentrism of influence than allowed in the hierarchical binarism of Casanova’s model. Finally, the postcolonial aesthetic of “teacherliness”, clearer in the late realism of Farah’s mature work, signals a fundamental rewriting, rather than a derivative renewal, of modernist aesthetic modes privileging technique of the major cities of the global north. Keywords: Nuruddin Farah, Pascale Casanova, world systems, literary theory, postcolonial literature, translation

Individualism in the Novels of Nuruddin Farah

The subject conceived as 'individual' is a sustained focus across the novels of Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah. This thesis locates a reading of individualism in Farah's novels in the context of the historical and philosophical development of modern identity in the societies of the North-Atlantic. It relies primarily on the analysis of philosopher, Charles Taylor, who proposes that individualism makes modern identity an historically unprecedented mode of conceiving the person. By individualism, Taylor refers to the inward location of moral sources in orientation around which the self is constituted. Nonindividualist conceptions of the self locate moral horizons external to the subject thereby defined. The novel appears to be the most significant cultural form which mutually constitutes modern subjectivity. This is suggested by the centrality of the Bildungsroman sub-genre which fundamentally determines the form of the novel. Farah's work spans the historical development of the novel from the proto-realism of his first publication, through modernism and postmodernism, returning to the 'neo-realism' of his most recent novel. The representation of the subject in the novel suggests transformations in identity which belie the uniformity of the disengaged, autonomous self which is articulated in the novel as a genre. Tension thus is generated between the social commitment Farah expresses as a writer and the limitations of the form which deny representation to the heteronomous subjectivities who are the objects of Farah's concern. The introduction identifies the centrality of individualism to Farah's project. Chapter 1 explores the historical development of individualism and genealogies of alternative conceptions of self. Chapter 2 addresses the articulation of individualism in the classic Bildungsroman, the sub-genre which defines the novel. Chapter 3 interrogates Farah's use of the 'dissensual' Bildungsroman to escape the contradiction of the classic Bildungsroman. Chapter 4 focuses on how modernism in the novels allows aesthetic resolution of individualist contradiction through fragmentation. Chapter 5 explores the resistance encountered when the novel attempts to represent heteronomy rather than autonomy. Chapter 6 suggests the indispensability of coherent subjectivity to Farah's socially committed stance. Within the philosophical matrix of individualism, the 'performative' or 'stylized' subject is the consequential form of identity

Nuruddin Farah: Selected bibliography

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When orature becomes literature: Somali oral poetry and folktales in Somali novels

The article discusses Somali literature, with particular focus given to the influence of Somali oral poetry and folk tales on modern novels. The difference between the concepts of orature and oral literature is examined, and the history of print and oral literary culture coexisting in Somalia is commented on.Web of Scienc

Chronology: Nuruddin Farah

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Introduction: Reinscribing Nuruddin Fara in African literature

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Garciá Márquez, magic realism and language as material practice

In this essay I examine the political implications of the shifts in definition of the term, "magic realism". Magic realism as it was originally employed in the Latin-American context signified a concept different to what it is currently held to suggest in metropolitan literary discourse. Magic realism in the first world has come to be regarded as a third world reflection of its own cultural dominant, postmodernism, without an acknowledgement of the alternative material realities which inform it. I investigate these ideas through an analysis of the work of two novelists, namely, the Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the American, John Barth. In a well-known essay titled "The Literature of Replenishment", Barth names Garcia Marquez as the foremost postmodern writer. This is deceptive, I argue, since although in the essay Barth presents postmodernist fiction as a political advance on the earlier styles of realism and modernism, his own fictional practice contradicts his claim. While in the essay Barth presents postmodernism as politically significant by virtue of its "democratic impulse", his novel, Chimera, seeks to avoid the political through a flawed understanding of textuality. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude stands in stark contrast with Chimera since it underscores the political consideration central to discourse through stressing the text's material, historical context. This distinction between the two novels is brought to light particularly through the incremental differences in their use of the techniques of "narrative circularity" and repetition. I argue, furthermore, that Garcia Marquez's emphasis on language as a material practice is, at least in part, owing to the specifics of the style of magic realism. While postmodernist fiction, one of the cultural effects of an advanced capitalism, may slide ineluctably into notions of pure textuality, magic realism, constituted as it is at the interface of pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production, compels an acknowledgement of the material world

Reflecting back, projecting forward: A conversation with Nuruddin Farah

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Dog sacrifice in Isidore Okpewho’s call me by my rightful name and the Works of Wole Soyinka: Ogun, race, identity and diaspora

This essay considers the ways in which the significance of blood sacrifice in the propitiation of the Yoruba god Ogun is transformed in the context of international literature which asserts an endogenous African modernity, and the specificity of black experience and identity. It focuses mainly on Isidore Okpewho’s 2004 novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name, compared with the role of Ogun in Wole Soyinka’s aesthetics, foregrounding key essays, drama and poetry. Okpewho’s novel presents the reality of the ancestral call among the Yoruba of the American and Caribbean diaspora, which synecdochically represents the call of an essentialized Africa. The central character, Otis Hampton, is a middle class basketball playing African- American college student who inexplicably begins to respond in uncontrollable ways to African drumming and involuntarily chants in a language he does not understand

Travelling home: Diasporic dis-locations of space and place in Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician

The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician, a novel by Zimbabwean diasporic writer Tendai Huchu, adds to a growing body of global immigrant fiction. Huchu’s novel concerning Zimbabwean émigrés in the United Kingdom displays a heightened spatial consciousness that self-reflexively complicates the spatial tropes and trends of much migrant literature. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician generates an unrelenting dialectic in which the national home, both for migrants and citizens, is often unhomely, while host spaces yield to various forms of place-making and belonging. City space, in this case the city of Edinburgh, is shown through the unique mobilities of the three protagonists to produce different senses of identity. However, the forms of identity that emerge ultimately succumb to the spatial implosion represented by the death (in contained spaces) of two of the principal characters, whose city perambulations are thus brought to a halt. The reader discovers, furthermore, that the third character is not the cartographer of his re-orienting mental map of the host city, but that his itinerary has been directed all along by a sinister, somewhat ubuesque Zimbabwean expatriate, to whom the third character, fooled by this regime spy’s clownish conduct, condescends and mistakenly patronizes