The ‘Write’ Approach in Three Twenty-First-Century Studies

Abstract

This review article seeks to trace connections among three contemporary texts that all, in their different ways, attempt to trace a new path to the future, and throw some light upon the darkness that defines quotidian reality. All three turn on comparable authoritative probity. It begins with Achile Membe’s Out of the Dark Night, a collection of essays on decolonisation that points the way to recovery via ‘Afropolitanism’. Fetson Kalua’s Re-imagining African Identity in the Twenty-First Century likewise erases racially based borders or notions of ‘otherness’, be it colour-based or cultural. Kalua deploys the term ‘intermediality’ signifying tolerance of difference, in his exploration, homing in on African identity. Yuval Noah Harari’s earlier 21 Lessons for the 21st Century has a broader cultural and technological lens. Yet all three explore what it means to be human and, by extension, why writers write as they do, implicitly interrogating what constitutes humanity and the purpose of art in the ‘write’ approach.

Keywords:

• African identity
• Afropolitanism
• decoloniality
• Kalua
• Harari
• Mbembe

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary Gray

Rosemary Gray is Professor Emerita and Research Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria. Her publications include the studies The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri, Commemorative Snapshots: Recalibrating Our Blue Diamond, and Light Comes Out of the Darkness. She is the managing editor of the English Academy Review: A Journal of English Studies.