Marxism and African literary studies today

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxism and African Literatures: New Interventions,’ argues for the continued relevance of Marxist approaches within African literary studies. After a discussion of the place of Marxism in the field today, a brief history of important Marxist interventions is provided, with particular attention paid to works by Omafume F. Onoge, Biodun Jeyifo, George M. Gugelberger, and Chidi Amuta. Against this background, the nine essays (and one afterword) contained in this issue are introduced.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• African literature
• dialectics
• African literary studies
• Omafume F. Onoge
• George M. Gugelberger
• Chidi Amuta

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A rigorous act of materialist literary interpretation is now needed to recover “real” meaning from the metaphysical fogs and abstracted empirical details which enshroud the accumulating exegeses on the major dramatic works of Soyinka. (Jeyifo, 1984, p. 1)

Marxist criticism goes beyond a content and form analysis of artistic works, to a consideration of the very institutional processes of art creation and art criticism. Marxist critics are concerned to struggle for a democratization of the structures of artistic production and criticism. (Onoge, 1985, p. 60)

African literature and its criticism testify to the historical contradictions that define the African situation. In order to resolve these contradictions in the direction of progressive change, literary criticism must be predicated on a theoretical outlook that couples cultural theory back to social practice. In this respect, literary theory and practice must form part of the anti-imperialist struggle, thus demystifying literary criticism and reintegrating it into the social experience and practice of which literature itself is very much part. (Amuta, 1989/2017, p. 7)

These three epigraphs speak to the power and attraction of Marxist approaches to African literatures.¹ As a corrective to the ‘subtle reification of art and literary expression’ (1984, p. 2) that he discerns in much of the scholarship on Wole Soyinka’s drama, Biodun Jeyifo calls for a criticism that has the capacity to see beyond the often-contradictory layers of ideology that accrue to a text and to discern its truth as a materially grounded utterance. As he makes clear, this is categorically not an empiricist mode of reading, but rather a hermeneutic one that involves eliciting the precise valences of the different layers of ideology that might otherwise lead the reader astray. This dialectical mode of reading is extended, in the quotation from Omafume F. Onoge, to include the institutional forces that influence African literary production and structure scholarly engagement with it. The point of such a criticism, Onoge reminds us, is not merely to produce readings of literary texts, but also to revise and render more equitable the structures within which such readings occur. Chidi Amuta, in the third epigraph, argues that a politically engaged criticism cannot install itself in the proverbial ‘ivory tower,’ but must occur on the same social and practical level as the literature that it studies. This means that it does not merely constitute a commentary upon the struggle against imperialism, but is itself a component of that struggle.

The three statements are all taken from important works in the history of Marxist writing on African literatures and hail from a period (roughly stretching from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s) when a number of influential Marxist interventions were published. Evident in each of the epigraphs is what, at least at that historical juncture – marked by the critical reassessment of decolonization and the material continuation of neocolonial exploitation in Africa – appeared to be important affinities between Marxist analysis and the study of African literatures. Marxist modes of reading, with their capacity to think through the politics of the literary in dialectical relation to the material circumstances in which it is produced, were particularly suited to understanding the ideological positionings of various African writers vis-à-vis neocolonial power structures. This dialecticism also ensured an indispensable self-reflexivity: to study the politics of African literary texts was also to interrogate and potentially reshape the ideological and material underpinnings of the study of that literature. Taking its cue from these ideas, this special issue aims to explore some of the ways in which Marxist critical approaches to African literatures are relevant to the current field of African literary studies.

In approaching the location of Marxism within African literary criticism today, it is necessary to note that materialist perspectives, in the broadest terms, are a major feature of the field. Even a cursory examination of recent issues of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, the Journal of the African Literature Association, and Research in African Literatures reveals the prevalence of keywords such as capitalism, neoliberalism, globalization, and world-system, all of which suggest attempts by scholars to locate African literary production within the social, political, and economic contexts in which it occurs. While we might partly attribute this to the influence of theories of ‘world literature’ that emphasize the importance of the production and circulation of literary texts, it also seems likely that the recent boom in African-diaspora literature has prompted more scholars to adopt modes of inquiry that are attentive to the complex imbrications of literary works within local and global circuits of culture and capital.²

Yet although the critical readings undertaken by many scholars today deploy terms that recall Marxist discourses, and while they may adopt a highly critical posture vis-à-vis ‘global capitalism’ and its cognates, this is often not accompanied by any robust engagement with Marxist theories and methodologies. Take, for instance, the recent Routledge Handbook of African Literature, which ‘aims to serve as an aggregation of studies of African literary texts embodying some of the newer critical approaches from the end of the twentieth to the early decades of the twenty-first century’ (Adejunmobi & Coetzee, 2019, p. 1). In an essay from the volume entitled ‘Globalisation, Mobility and Labour in Diasporic African Fiction,’ Anna-Leena Toivanen (2019) examines the association between paid work and personal mobility in three contemporary novels from the diaspora. Although the essay adopts a definition of labor from an essay by the economist Guy Standing that ‘invokes the patterns of exploitation and control as well as the notion of political consciousness exploitation may generate’ (p. 48), this interpretation of the term fails to acknowledge the specificity of labor as productive of capitalist value.³ When reading the essay, it is difficult not to speculate that a more explicitly Marxist understanding of labor might help Toivanen to take her analysis further: deploying, for example, the categories of ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labor might help the essay to be far more specific about how the kinds of work that its three chosen novels depict is related to global capitalist accumulation, to particular flows of capital, and thus to specific kinds of mobility. Such a focus on labor as a value-producing activity might also allow for a more robust assessment of the precise political import of the association between mobility and labor in these texts, one that would be distinctive from the essay’s current claim that the novels ‘detach the issues of mobility and labour from what is traditionally conceived as the domain of politics’ (p. 57).⁴ This is not to launch a full critique of Toivanen’s essay, but rather to demonstrate how the analysis of profoundly materialist issues in African literary scholarship is often decoupled from the Marxist tradition that was once its domain.⁵ If we understand Marxism’s principal offering to be an unrivalled sensitivity to the historical specificity of capitalism, its increasingly ‘global reach,’ and its mechanisms of exploitation, the lack of engagement with at least some of Marxism’s large body of works constitutes a considerable impoverishment of our critical idiom.

All this is not to say that the Marxist criticism of African literatures has gone ‘out of fashion’ as such. Indeed, there are numerous critics in the field for whom it remains an important theoretical and political touchstone, often in explicit terms. The point is rather to note that the affinities between Marxist literary criticism/political economy and the study of African literature that were evidenced in the epigraphs to this introduction no longer present themselves so naturally. This can, of course, be partly attributed to the decline of Marxist struggles and socialisms on the African continent; whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, figures such as Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, or Thomas Sankara provided examples of African Marxism in action, such concrete instantiations are today few and far between. But Toivanen’s essay is also an example of how Marxist analysis has, to a certain extent, been simultaneously absorbed and sidelined by the field; its broader concerns are present, yet the theoretical underpinnings are often absent. Olaniyan (2016) describes this tendency when, in a footnote that acknowledges the importance of the ‘“ideological” criticism’ of Jeyifo, Ngũgĩ, and Onoge in the history of African literary studies, he writes that such a mode of critique can continue today without an understanding of its Marxist precursors: ‘The effectiveness of the deployment of ideological awareness or critique today does not depend on knowing much about its conceptual subtleties in Marxist criticism whether generally or in African literary studies in particular’ (p. 395, n. 15). While this may be the case, I would respond that just because an ideological critique can occur without an appreciation of its Marxist lineages, this doesn’t mean that it should. Understanding the theoretical and institutional history of the ideological approach to African literatures must surely be an important component of conducting such a critique today, if only to help avoid any missteps that may have occurred in the past.⁶ In order to moderate the sometimes problematic absorption of Marxism into a more generalized materialism, the present special issue aims to demonstrate the relevance of Marxist analyses to many of the issues raised by contemporary African writing and to consider how the long and diverse history of Marxist readings of African literatures informs the current critical climate.

Before turning to the individual essays included in this issue, it will be useful to mention some of the key figures and events in the history of Marxist approaches to African literatures. One of the earliest Marxist critics in the field was Grant Kamenju, whose Marxist-Fanonist approach influenced numerous colleagues and students at the universities of Leeds, Makerere, and Dar es Salaam, not least among them Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Ngũgĩ, 2018, p. 213). Although, as Ngũgĩ (2018) states in a brief appraisal of Kamenju’s career, the critic did not publish widely, his influence upon his students was significant (p. 213). Indeed, Ngũgĩ eulogizes him as ‘an unsung hero of the literature revolution and a relentless advocate of the relevance of literature to life, to the struggles for economic, political, Cultural and spiritual emancipation’ (p. 213). In addition to Ngũgĩ himself, who has published several volumes of essays that contain materialist appraisals of African literary texts, another influential early voice was Omafume F. Onoge.⁷ In a widely cited essay, ‘The Crisis of Consciousness in Modern African Literature: A Survey’ (1974), Onoge historicizes the political orientations of different groups of African writers in relation to the continent’s colonial and postcolonial experiences. This involves the classification of post-Negritude African writers under the headings of ‘critical realist’ (Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe) and ‘socialist realist’ (Ngũgĩ, Ousmane Sembène). Whereas the critical realists ‘advocate a literature that is engaged with the contemporary reality in a critical way’ (p. 400) and ‘merely testify to the condition of social crisis’ (p. 402), socialist-realist writers ‘offer a precise diagnosis’ by identifying capitalist exploitation as the cause of this crisis (p. 402). These writers ‘accep[t] that these problems can be overcome only by the liquidation of the capitalist state’ (p. 403). Onoge uses the latter part of his essay to consider the extent to which Africa’s material circumstances in the postcolonial period allow the further development of socialist realist writing. This sociology of African literature was elaborated by Onoge in subsequent essays in the 1970s and 1980s.⁸

In addition to these two early figures, it is also necessary to mention Biodun Jeyifo, whose penetrating analyses of African theatre have consistently been accompanied by a strong capacity for demystifying theoretical and conceptual issues in the field. Although Jeyifo has never published a standalone meditation on Marxism or materialism, many of his works contain invaluable insights into questions of methodology.⁹ As Olakunle George has noted in a recent appraisal of Jeyifo’s work, ‘Ranging over drama, the novel, and critical theory, specifically from a materialist standpoint, Jeyifo almost always begins with the particular in order to seek out what is universal within each such particularity’ (George, 2018, p. 15). It is this remarkable capacity to elaborate the complex connections between the general and the particular that has been the hallmark of his intensely dialectical criticism. Never doctrinaire in his application of Marxist concepts, he often deploys them in unexpected, yet highly insightful ways. In his classic essay, ‘The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical Theory,’ for instance, Jeyifo (1990) uses a notion of hypostasis borrowed from Marx’s The German Ideology combined with Althusser’s insights into the functioning of ideology in order to probe the assumptions that underlie African literary scholarship (p. 36; p. 46).

Essays by Kamenju, Onoge, and Jeyifo were included in George M. Gugelberger’s edited volume, Marxism and African Literature, from which the present special issue adapts its title. Published in 1985, Gugelberger’s collection of essays ignited debates over the relative importance of race and class in African literatures and contained severe criticism of the mythopoetics of Wole Soyinka.¹⁰ Situating the volume in opposition to the ‘implicit privileging of bourgeois Western approaches to literature’ (p. vii) in the mainstream of African literary criticism, Gugelberger’s introduction announces an approach to African literatures that prioritizes questions of class over those of race or ethnicity: ‘Looking at the African scene from a Marxist perspective obviously meant two things: encouragement and recognition for those who have started writing in this tradition, but at the same time a warning that African specificity (race/Africaneity) cannot any longer be privileged concepts once progressive internationalist positions are taken’ (p. x). This class-based perspective situates the volume contra many of the principal scholars in the field at that moment – Charles Larson, Eustace Palmer, Abiola Irele, and others – and also locates it firmly in opposition to the traditionalist approaches to African literature adopted by Chinweizu et al. and Soyinka.¹¹ Marxist criticism, then, is construed by Gugelberger as a radical materialist alternative to the range of theoretical dispositions in the field of African literary studies as it then existed.

The 13 essays included in Marxism and African Literature are relatively diverse in their themes. In addition to broader questions methodology and established themes such as radical African writers and African drama, the topics covered also include Angolan writing, Urhobo song-poetry, and the work of the Nigerian novelist Cyprian Ekwensi. Although the essays are more theoretically diverse than Gugelberger’s introduction to them would seem to suggest, they nevertheless evidence – with important exceptions found in Onoge’s, Jeyifo’s, and several other contributions – a somewhat rigid application of Marxist concepts of class and ideology. In some cases, the essays take the form of assessments of the extent to which certain works of literature do or do not demonstrate a progressive politics and, in so doing, tend to prioritize questions of content over those of form.¹² Interestingly, none of the essays engage substantively with the work of Fredric Jameson, and there is no mention at all of his 1981 book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1983), a work that one might have thought particularly useful for the ideological critiques of African literary texts that several of the essays develop. This absence is, we might hazard, indicative of the somewhat mechanical Marxist approaches deployed by some of the authors in the collection, which have little in common with the more dialectical approach to literary texts favored by Jameson. Be that as it may, Gugelberger’s book was widely cited in the decades following its publication and certainly raised the profile of radical criticism within the field. What still distinguishes it as a work of collective scholarship is the overriding sense of political commitment in each of the essays, a feature that makes it distinctive from Emmanuel Ngara’s somewhat more circumspect – but nonetheless important – Art and Ideology in the African Novel: A Study of the Influence of Marxism on African Writing, which was also published in 1985.¹³

In Chidi Amuta’s 1989 book, Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism, dialectics are placed at the heart matter.¹⁴ Like Gugelberger before him, Amuta positions his book in opposition to both ‘bourgeois criticism of African literature’ (p. 2) and traditionalist approaches to the subject, chief among the latter that of Chinweizu et al. The alternative, however, is not to be found only in a class-analysis of African texts, but in a more capacious ‘sociology of literature’ that ‘perceives the context of literature, its content and form as dialectically interconnected areas for comprehending the social essence of literature’ (p. 9). Amuta goes on to establish a ‘dialectical theory of African literature,’ the ‘cornerstone’ of which is ‘the need to historicize that literature, to re-establish that organic link between literature and its informing and sustaining historical milieu which bourgeois criticism in its purely formalistic manifestations constantly obfuscates’ (p. 89). Crucially, in the African context, this approach involves engaging ‘the challenge of the imperialist assault on Africa and the reality of neo-colonialism’ (p. 89). The dialectical criticism of African literature is thus part and parcel of the ongoing struggle for liberation and, as such, is a highly committed act. Amuta’s book remains of considerable interest not only for its highly original engagement with a range of Marxist thinkers and its provocative readings of a range of narrative, dramatic, and poetic texts, but also for its numerous insights into the ideological underpinnings of the field.

Amuta’s book can be seen as the last major work in the series of Marxist interventions that began with Onoge’s essays in the 1970s.¹⁵ The apparent decline in the visibility of Marxist approaches to African literatures after the 1980s can be partly explained by historical developments during this period. Indeed, by the beginning of the 1990s, Marxisms across the world were in crisis following the end of the Cold War, while in Africa many ‘Afro-Marxist’ movements and governments had lost much of their influence, thus raising questions (for some!) about the continued viability and utility of Marxist analysis.¹⁶ Within the study of literature, this period saw the consolidation of postcolonial studies, the field where much of the discussion about African literature was to occur (at least in the Anglo-American academy) during the subsequent years. As Parry (2004) has shown, this emergent field was primarily poststructuralist in orientation rather than materialist, with the contributions of previous generations of Marxist anti-colonial theorists largely forgotten (p. 74; pp. 77–79). What is important to note, however, is that Marxist criticism of African literature continued during this period. While scholars such as Jeyifo continued to produce important works, other substantial interventions appeared that resonated not only with African literary studies but also with other intellectual formations within the study of literature. Two brief examples will suffice here. First, Neil Lazarus’s Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (1990) provided both an account of the problematics of resistance in postcolonial Africa and an assessment of the politics of one of the most visible writers of the post-independence period, Ayi Kwei Armah. Lazarus’s insights into the role of the nation in postcolonial Africa and the strengths and limitations of Frantz Fanon’s writings on decolonization, both infused with a close attention to questions of class, constitute an important Marxist perspective on what would emerge as two of the central concerns of postcolonial studies. Second, Nicholas Brown’s Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (2005) uses ‘an orthodox interpretation of the Marxist revision of the Hegelian dialectic’ (p. 4) in order to ‘argu[e] for establishing the interpretive horizon of twentieth-century literature at capitalism’s internal limit’ (p. 1). Reading African and Anglophone modernist writing together, Brown argues that works as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure share a common concern with a radical rethinking of social relations. In Lazarus’s and Brown’s monographs, then, Marxist approaches to African literatures are part of broader interventions within literary studies than had previously been the case.

The resurgence of interest in the category of ‘world literature,’ both alongside and in opposition to postcolonial studies, has seen a renewal of interest in the relations between literature and global capitalism.¹⁷ While on the one hand, this has seen the non-Marxist materialist strains of criticism – as discussed above – develop, it has also been part of a fascinating encounter between literary studies and world-systems theory. Most often associated with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, world-systems theory ‘in fact grew out of a number of a number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including Marxist economics, dependista theory, and Annales historiography’ (Eatough, 2015a, p. 593). It is therefore not a unified theory as such, but rather an approach that seeks to understand global capitalism, the inequalities that structure it, and their historical development in systemic terms. Although the focus on economic issues in world-systems theory has often raised questions about its applicability to studies of literature and culture, the revival of ‘world literature’ and the global turn in the humanities more generally has seen an interest in using its insights for literary study. As Eatough (2015b) puts it, scholars wishing to move beyond restrictive paradigms of ‘national’ literatures ‘have found in world-systems theory a conceptual language capable of reshaping literary geography according to a more “global” or “transnational” frame’ (p. 604). African literary studies has been no exception to this trend, with many critics basing their readings on models of global capitalism that are derived from world-systems theory, often via literary theorists such as Moretti or Casanova, both of whom engage with versions of the Wallersteinian world-system in their work.¹⁸ One application of world-systems theory to literary studies that is particularly relevant to this introduction is the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) 2015 book, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Aiming ‘to resituate the problem of “world literature”, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development’ (p. 6), the WReC fuse an understanding of the capitalist world-system as ‘“one and unequal”’ (p. 10, the term is Moretti’s) with Leon Trotsky’s influential account of the ways in which ‘the imposed capitalist forces of production and class relations tend not to supplant (or are not allowed to supplant) but to be conjoined forcibly with pre-existing forces and relations’ (pp. 10–11). With its provocative insights into the ways in which literatures from capitalism’s (semi-)peripheries ‘register’ this combined-unevenness – and the reading of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is particularly interesting in this regard – the book provides important ways of thinking through the relations between the world-system’s inequalities and literary aesthetics.

This brief historical overview of Marxist scholarship is far from exhaustive, but it is intended to highlight some of the key issues that have animated radical and materialist inquiries into African literatures.¹⁹ Marxist criticism, I have tried to show, has changed and developed in relation to a range of influences and has been adapted by a range of individual practitioners. Informed by this rich and variegated tradition, the essays in this special issue explore the valences and possibilities of such approaches today. Although they all demonstrate a commitment to understanding the relations between literature and capitalism, the essays are highly diverse in their engagement with different schools of Marxist thought and draw upon a wide range of figures from its global history. In terms of the contributions that they try to make, they broadly fall into two categories: some consider Marxist approaches to established problems in the study of literatures from the continent (Afropolitanism, the supernatural, science fiction), others focus on the points of contact between Marxism and particular African writers (Henry Ole Kulet, Ifeoma Okoye, Ayi Kwei Armah).

John Masterson’s essay pursues the complex connections between Afropolitanism, the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, and the rhetoric of Barack Obama in order to argue that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Imbolo Mbue’s (2016) Behold the Dreamers both ‘probe the “contradictions and ambiguities” at the heart of neoliberal discourse, from the African to North American continents.’ While Afropolitan novels are often criticized for their apparent insensitivity to questions of class, Masterson demonstrates that these two texts, when read in relation to a wide range of different Marxist thinkers, actually register the social contradictions of the Obama-era neoliberal culture in which they are set. Despite the fact that neither of the two novels is explicitly Marxist in orientation, Masterson shows that they nevertheless speak to important issues in contemporary Marxist thought: ‘In their distinctive ways, Americanah and Behold the Dreamers are similarly propelled by dialectical, if ambivalent, negotiations of hegemony and counter-hegemony, the local and the global, physics and metaphysics and the pasts, presents and futures of a neoliberalism defined by its dynamism in a way inflected, if not directly inspired by a Hydra-headed Marx.’²⁰ In its reference to a wide range of Marxist thinkers and its conscious attention to the history of Marxist approaches to African literatures, the essay invites us to rethink our understanding of the politics of these widely studied Afropolitan novels.

While the issue of Afropolitanism is central to the current field of African literary studies, a more longstanding – yet still crucial – question is that of the relation between African literatures and the literary canon. Sidestepping the somewhat exhausted questions of African literature’s connection to (and/or subversion of) the ‘Western canon,’ as well as that of the appropriate criteria for admission into a canon of ‘African literature,’ Hayley Toth’s and Brendon Nicholls’ essay contemplates a new model of the canon entirely, with particular concern for post-Apartheid South Africa. Their argument, however, begins not with South Africa, but with Hegel and the history of the dialectic. After providing a nuanced reading of the relations between the dialectic and Hegel’s clearly expressed prejudice against Africans, Toth and Nicholls trace the valences of the dialectic²¹ from the famous ‘master-slave’/‘lord-bondsman’ passage of the Phenomenology through to its appropriation by Marx and subsequent adoption by Steve Biko for the purposes of the Black Consciousness Movement. They show that Biko’s dialectic – elaborated through an engagement with Hegel, Marx, Fanon, and Sartre – allowed for a simultaneous attention to questions of race and class. This, they argue, calls for a reassessment of previous Marxist critiques of the Black Consciousness Movement that have accused it of prioritizing questions of culture over class-analysis. The intersectionality that characterizes Biko’s deployment of dialectical thought informs the essay’s proposal for ‘a “polythetic” dialectic to rework the post-Apartheid literary canon and to accommodate intersectional complexity within it.’ In the course of seven ‘provocations’ Toth and Nicholls elaborate a model for the South African canon that ‘does not emerge from a settled consensus, but instead re-coalesces on every occasion that it is submitted to contestation or is approached via conflicts in the social …. a polythetic dialectic is sufficiently flexible to manage the complexities of contestation and reaction via which the canon emerges and is (endlessly) revised.’ The essay’s contribution is thus twofold: it first offers a reading of dialectics that, by both acknowledging and moving beyond Hegel’s Eurocentrism, demonstrates its historical role in, and pertinence to (South) African contexts. Second, Toth and Nicholls encourage a politically engaged and resolutely intersectional formulation of the canon that, while particularly relevant to post-Apartheid literature, holds promise as a model for engagement with the increasingly heterogeneous body of African texts that we read and teach. The essay’s concern with the ways in which a dialectical conception of the canon might help us to move beyond the institutional boundaries that currently structure engagement with African literatures demonstrates the continuing validity of Onoge’s assertion that ‘Marxist critics are concerned to struggle for a democratization of the structures of artistic production and criticism’ (Onoge, 1985, p. 60).

Adam Mayer, an historian of Nigerian Marxisms, considers the ways in which the Igbo feminist writer Ifeoma Okoye – and, in particular, her 1984 novel Men Without Ears – engages questions of neo-traditional rule in contemporary Igboland. In the first sections of his essay, Mayer undertakes an important discussion of the relevance of theories of ‘feudalization’ to the Igboland of the post-oil boom period. In so doing, he effectively outlines a new Marxist approach to the issue and his particular deployment of the term ‘inchoate feudalization’ will be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines. Turning to Okoye’s novel, Mayer argues that through its narrative focus on the character of Chigo, the text subtly lays out the complex patriarchal power networks that function in contemporary Igboland. Particular attention is paid here to the role of ‘feudal masculinity’ in maintaining class disparity in a context of ‘monetary plenty.’ Central to Mayer’s analysis is the notion that literary texts – and Okoye’s novel in particular – can do important political work in so far as they uncover the complex connections between gender and class and ‘demystify’ feudalist power structures.

Three of the essays in this issue pursue what might be called the afterlives of realism in African literatures. Debates over the status of realism, of course, have been a persistent feature of Marxist criticism from Friedrich Engels’ comments in the famous letter to Margaret Harkness, to Georg Lukács’ highly influential interventions, to recent work by Fredric Jameson, and many others in between.²² While much early African fiction was written in versions of a realist narrative register (Achebe, Armah, and Ngũgĩ, for instance), this tendency appeared to have fallen away somewhat by the 1980s and 1990s.²³ Indeed, some of the best-known African novels of that period – Okri’s (1991) The Famished Road, Cheney-Coker’s (1990) The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, and Laing’s (1986/1988)Search Sweet Country – were written in what has been identified as a ‘magical realist’ mode. Recent years, however, have seen not only a resurgence of realist narratives of various kinds but also a critical reevaluation of the role of realism in African literatures.²⁴ While these three essays should be seen as part of that trend, they can also be understood – directly and indirectly – as attempts to deal with the implications of Lukács’ writings on realism for African contexts.

In his essay, Thomas Waller pursues some of the questions raised by the WReC’s deployment of the theory of ‘critical irrealism.’ In Combined and Uneven Development, the WReC borrow this term from Michael Löwy (who himself construed it in relation to Lukács’ critical realism) in order to account for and explain in world-systemic terms the decidedly non-realist features of many narratives produced on capitalism’s (semi-)peripheries. For Waller, the European origins of the theory of critical irrealism raise serious questions concerning ‘the discrepancy between its conceptual provenance and the structures of feeling in the texts to which it is applied.’ This is an important point: while critical irrealism appears to attend to the narrative idiosyncrasies of semi-peripheral literary texts, it nevertheless seeks to explain them, in the WReC’s usage, in terms of the functioning of the capitalist world-system and thus potentially obscures the sociocultural specificities of irrealist narrative features. In an attempt to ‘nuance’ the WReC’s usage of critical irrealism, Waller first traces the conceptual underpinnings of Löwy’s theory and argues, via a discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jameson, that irrealism constitutes an attempt to represent and resolve profound social and political contradictions. Moving to the WReC’s irrealism, he argues that ‘What goes missing in the WReC’s appeal to a world-literary system that is both “one, and unequal” is an appreciation of the determining role of location in literary texts.’ In the interests of demonstrating how we might ‘recuperate[e] the more locally specific properties of (semi-)peripheral cultural texts for the WReC’s theory of critical irrealism,’ Waller offers a reading of Ondjaki’s 2012 Portuguese-language novel, Os Transparentes. While he elucidates a connection between the protagonist’s increasing transparency throughout the course of the narrative and the ‘structural social contradiction’ of Angola’s ‘resource curse’ that would seem to support a WReC-style critical irrealist reading, Waller also identifies aspects of the narrative – including the rendering of Umbundu-language speech in italicized Portuguese – that point to a deeper social tradition that exists within the capitalist world-system, but is not entirely determined by it. Ultimately, Waller suggests that although the theory of critical irrealism retains considerable utility, a fuller account of irrealist literary features must include an attention to indigenous sociocultural practices and traditions.

Amy Riddle takes up the question of the supernatural – understood, following Moradewun Adejunmobi, as ‘the unknown and potentially unknowable or that which cannot be apprehended’ – and socioeconomic crises in African literatures. While the supernatural elements of African writing have often been overlooked by Marxist critics, at least in so far as they are not understood to have the same political potency as other modes of writing, Riddle makes the important claim that ‘the supernatural could be the source of sophistication in certain works, because it captures the workings of capital in a way that realism cannot.’ Lukács is a key interlocutor here and Riddle provides an important account of the distinctions between supernaturalism and naturalism, as the latter was construed and critiqued by Lukács. As it transpires, the kinds of texts with she is concerned have more in common with Lukács’ version of realism than they do with naturalism in so far as they allow an insight into the true realities of capitalist exploitation. An important aspect of Riddle’s materialist approach to the supernatural is her argument that it can function as a way of coming to terms with the contradictions of capitalism: ‘The supernatural is well attuned to capturing the logic of capital as it acutely narrates the unease of living within an intangible system that is responsible for automatically reproducing horrific inequalities.’ This case is made using readings of Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Ibrahim Meguid’s House of Jasmine – texts that emanate from different eras of Africa’s encounter with the capitalist world-system, but nevertheless use the supernatural in their engagement with socioeconomic issues. In its emphasis upon how the supernatural functions as a means of negotiating transitions in the world-system as experienced by different communities, Riddle’s essay shares important common ground with Waller’s discussion of the relations between social contradictions and critical irrealism.

The relations between realism and contemporary African science fiction are the subject of Peter Maurits’ essay, in which he connects recent debates over the role of the genre in African literatures with the critical history of realism in the field of African literary studies. Focusing particularly on the writings of Onoge, he identifies an influential positive evaluation of African realism (in terms that owe much to both Brecht and to Lukács) for its ability to reveal the realities of colonialism. The legacy of this favoring of realism, he suggests, is evidenced in the public and academic debate around African science fiction and, crucially, is registered in important works in the genre ‘both as formal and intradiegetic tension and as realist method.’ Maurits identifies two tendencies that index the negotiation of realism in contemporary African science fiction. The first is what he calls ‘data voices,’ the incorporation of data into science fiction which, in the case of Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland (2009), is part of ‘an at times nearly obsessive engagement with the problem of capturing and recognizing reality.’ The second tendency involves an attempt by writers of science fiction to use the genre to lay bare the totality of the capitalist world-system, a feature that is central to Lukács’ own understanding of realism. Maurits identifies this tendency in works by Carlos dos Santos, Pepetela, Ekari Mbvundula, and Abdourahman Waberi.

The complex connections between capitalist development, environmental degradation, and traditional subsistence practices are the topic of Mugo Muhia’s essay, which focuses on the Maasai of Kenya. Writing that ‘The modern history of the Maasai – the semi-nomadic ethnic group whose tribes inhabit areas of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania – is in many ways one of alienation from their lands,’ Muhia describes how the encroachment of colonial and postcolonial capitalism has dramatically reduced the Maasai’s rangelands in size and has thus had a detrimental effect upon their cattle-herding practices. Drawing substantially from Herbert Marcuse, in addition to more recent eco-Marxist writing, Muhia provides a reading of Henry Ole Kulet’s Vanishing Herds that shows how this 2011 novel exposes the relations between the Maasai’s dispossession of their lands and capitalist exploitation through its deployment of a ‘journey motif.’ Ultimately, he considers the implications of the protagonists’ refusal ‘to give up their way of life to capital and profit’ for discussions about modes of resistance to capitalism’s destruction of the environment.

An important aspect of the history of Marxism in Africa is the role that ‘non-literary’ genres of writing have played as sites of debate and theorization. In a recent article, for instance, Akin Adesokan has considered the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism as ‘intellectual initiatives whose histories bear a relationship to the changing fortunes of African Marxist discourses in the last 15 years of the twentieth century’ (Adesokan, 2018, p. 72). This kind of work is profoundly important because it provides the field with an understanding of theoretical and critical stakes of particular historical moments and, just as importantly, elucidates the role that the written word plays within them. Brahim El Guabli’s essay, which focuses on the ‘testimonial literature’ of the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist Movement, makes an important contribution in this regard. After providing a useful account of the MMLM’s emergence in post-independence Morocco, El Guabli argues that three memoirs written by former members of the movement do important retrospective theoretical work. He locates these texts as ‘testimonial literature,’ a genre that allows ‘a space for abstraction, argumentation, and counter-argumentation.’ The three memoirs that he discusses take very different theoretical directions in their consideration of the MMLM’s successes and failures. Whereas Abdelaziz Tribak’s book, Ilal Amam, autopsie d’un calvaire (2009), is highly critical of the movement and ‘questions both the theoretical and practical foundations of his former political organization’s project,’ al-Shāwī (2015) and Abraham Serfaty (1998) use their texts to ‘theorize possible alternatives in order to reinvent the Moroccan left and endow it with novel political roles in a fast-changing political context.’ In addition to its important contribution to the scholarship on Moroccan Marxisms, El Guabli’s essay is a timely reminder of the role that non-fiction writing can play in reassessing the strengths of revolutionary movements and imagining future political possibilities.

While El Guabli analyzes the work of writers who have thus far been absent from the mainstream of ‘African literary studies,’ it is also important (re)assess the politics of those key literary figures who emerged during and soon after decolonization and are now canonical in the field. Indeed, much remains to be said about how the works of writers as diverse as Ngũgĩ, Achebe, Sembène, and Soyinka portray the relations between colonialism and capitalism and the extent to which they engage with different strains of Marxist thought. Aaron Bartels-Swindells’ essay considers the complex issue of Ayi Kwei-Armah’s relationship with Marxism, one that has been far from consistent throughout the author’s career. He argues that Armah’s ‘seeming rejection of Marxism and invention of a revolutionary pan-Africanism may be understood as a generative engagement with Marxism.’ Through readings of several of Armah’s essays written between 1967 and 1984, Bartels-Swindells makes the case that Armah develops – in part through his ‘revolutionary Fanonism’ – a conception of culture that is informed by an understanding of class struggle before later elaborating the idea of ‘re-Africanization’ as ‘a revolutionary process’ that is ‘apposite to Marxism in challenging the capitalist world system.’ Crucially, this has consequences for our understanding of Armah’s literary practice and Bartels-Swindells makes the interesting claim that the author’s later turn to the historical novel should be understood as part of his growing interest in ‘re-Africanization’: ‘Armah ultimately chose the form of historical novel to narrate re-Africanization because his previous novels had exhausted realism’s capability to represent the changes in culture and consciousness requisite for decolonization.’ After providing new readings of Armah’s novels Fragments (1969) and Two Thousand Seasons (1973), the essay concludes by making a case for the continued relevance of Armah’s particular brand of ‘black Marxism’ to current critiques of racialized capitalism.

Taken together, the essays in this special issue reflect how Marxist criticism has kept pace with the broadening of the field of African literary studies. Whereas Gugelberger’s Marxism and African Literature, with its title that construes African literatures in the singular, reflected the then widespread tendency to think about literary production from the continent as primarily a collection of works, the essays here demonstrate how Marxism is particularly tooled to thinking through literature as a practice that occurs in different contexts. In this regard, it is significant that Mayer’s and Riddle’s contributions deal explicitly with questions of gender, which had been absent from Gugelberger’s volume and from other Marxist criticism of that period. And yet the diversity of primary texts and theoretical approaches that is in evidence offers an indication of only some of the future avenues of inquiry at the intersection of Marxism and African literatures. We have here evidence of a decentralized, ongoing, and unfinished project that, as I have tried to suggest, remains extremely pertinent. Neil Lazarus’s Afterword, which traces the changing fates of decolonizing and Marxist scholarship within postcolonial and African literary studies, provides a salutary reminder of some of the work that remains to be done in this regard. He concludes his essay by suggesting that ‘rather than attempt to fix Marx and Marxism once and for all in ahistorical aspic,’ a more pressing task is that of ‘honour[ing] the revolutionary commitment’ of important figures from the broad history of African Marxist intellectuals. The theory, he seems to suggest, means little without the practice, and it is precisely the question of what Marxism can do, rather than what it is, that should animate the continuing conversation in the field.

Acknowledgments

I would like to dedicate this introduction to the memory of Professor Tejumola Olaniyan, who was extremely supportive of this project from the beginning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Fyfe

Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of English at the American University of Beirut. His current research focuses on the relations between modern African literatures and the politics of subjectivity. His work has appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Research in African Literatures, and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.

Notes

1. My use of the terms ‘Marxism’ and ‘Marxist’ in this introduction is intended to be capacious and reflects not so much any particular ideological inclination on the part of those critics to whom it refers, but rather the fact of their consistent and significant engagement with the work of Karl Marx and/or the many who have subsequently continued his project of critiquing capitalism. The precise nature of this engagement, of course, varies substantially between individual critics.

2. I am referring particularly to influential theories of world literature that model literary production in relation to some version of a capitalist ‘world system,’ such as Moretti (2000) and Casanova (2007).

3. The precise quotation that Toivanen takes from Standing is as follows: ‘“Labour” is done for a wage or some form of remuneration. It has exchange value and is an activity, that of devoting time and effort to working for someone else, in some position of subordination’ (Standing, 2014, p. 964). Although the mention of ‘exchange value’ here shows an understanding of how labor itself can be a commodity, this definition does not retain the insights of Marx’s ‘labor theory of value.’

4. While Toivanen claims that the three novels do not style themselves as political interventions on the subject of labor, this does not mean that the texts do not have a politics themselves. Indeed, one might wish to interrogate the politics of what she calls ‘the gesture of turning away from politics’ (p. 57).

5. It should be added that this decoupling of materialism and Marxism is also evident in the broader field of postcolonial studies. The extent to which African literary studies is in this respect influenced by postcolonial studies is an important topic for another discussion.

6. I would also add that it is important to retain a materialist ideology critique, one that does not deal simply with ‘discourse,’ but also seeks to understand the relations between the ideological and the material.

7. Much remains to be said about Ngũgĩ’s critical practice. For important examples of his criticism, see Homecoming (1978) and Writers in Politics: Essays (1981).

8. See Onoge (1978, 1985).

9. See for instance, the essay ‘The Problem of Realism in Things Fall Apart: A Marxist Exegesis’ (Jeyifo, 1991) and the monograph Soyinka De-mythologised: Notes on a Materialist Reading of A Dance of the forests, the Road and Kongi’s Harvest (Jeyifo, 1984).

10. For an important response to Gugelberger’s dismissal of ethnicity, see Miller (1990, pp. 35–45). With respect to Soyinka, it is worth noting that Gugelberger acknowledges ‘what appears to be an anti-Soyinka bias in some of the essays’ (p. ix), before writing that ‘these essays should not be considered biased. They have nothing to do with propaganda. They rather account for a fact. They encourage and continue a dialogue which is deeply needed …’ (p. x). For reactions to the Marxist critique of Soyinka see Crow (1987) and Moody (1991). It is important to note that Marxist-oriented critiques of Soyinka precede the Gugelberger volume by many years. See, for instance, Stratton’s (Stratton, 1988, p. 532) discussion of Ngũgĩ’s and Yemi Ogunbiyi’s earlier reservations concerning Soyinka’s ‘social vision.’

11. See Gugelberger (1985a, pp. 11–12) for the editor’s classification of contemporary critics of African literature as ‘Larsonist,’ ‘African Euro-centric,’ ‘Bolekaja critics’ (i.e. Chinweizu & Madubuike, 1975), ‘Ogunist’ (i.e. Soyinka), and ‘Marxist.’ In their 1975 Transition essay, Chinweizu et al. criticize the Eurocentric frame of reference of several Nigerian poets and also bemoan literary critics’ reluctance to ‘come down hard on the would-be writers’ weaknesses’ (p. 34). They propose that ‘it is from the oral tradition that we must extract the foundation elements of a modern African poetics’ (p. 56). These arguments were consolidated in the book, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Chinweizu and Madubuike, 1980/1983).

12. See, for example, Hunt’s and Fatunde’s contributions to the volume.

13. While Marxism is the focus of Art and Ideology in the African Novel, it never quite adopts it with the same fervor as Gugelberger et al. In a contemporary review of Ngara’s book, Gugelberger critiques the author’s attempt to tether ‘stylistic’ and ‘Marxist’ modes of criticism: ‘The attempted marriage of “heaven and hell” (stylistic criticism and Marxist criticism) smells a bit of an avoidance to side fully with Marxism, which is particularly evident when Ngara discusses “para-linguistic affective devices” …’ (Gugelberger, 1985b, p. 583).

14. Amuta’s book was recently reissued by the publisher with a new introduction by Jeyifo (Amuta, 1989/2017).

15. This is not, of course, to say that those involved simply stopped producing Marxist scholarship, but rather to emphasize that Amuta’s book, with its important implications, was the last in a run of important works. For article-length studies published after 1990 that are similar in impetus to the earlier period of Marxist scholarship, see Selepe (1991) and Adéèkó (1997).

16. See Hughes (1992, p. 18) for a concise account of the decline of ‘“Afro-Marxist” regimes’ throughout the 1980s.

17. See Graham et al. (2012) for a discussion of the challenge posed to postcolonial studies by the resurgence of interest in ‘world literature’ which, it should be noted, is part of a broader ‘global turn’ in literary studies.

18. The slight irony of this entry of world-systems theory into the study of African literatures, of course, is that as a mode of analysis, it already has well-established African connections, albeit ones that are rarely acknowledged: Immanuel Wallerstein began his career as a scholar of African politics and decolonization (see, for example, Wallerstein, 1961) while Giovanni Arrighi spent several years in the 1960s teaching at universities in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Tanzania and wrote several important works about Africa’s place in the postcolonial world order (2002). In addition, Samir Amin, himself from Egypt, produced numerous studies of African issues from a world-systemic perspective (1972). It is also important to note the influence of Rodney’s (1972/2018) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, on Wallerstein and others.

19. Indeed, a fuller account of the history of Marxist criticism of African literatures would need to attend more robustly to the critical inquiries occurring in African universities and to specific instances of the affiliations between Marxist political movements in Africa and the practice of criticism.

20. The original version of this sentence contains in-text citations of works by Madhu Krishnan and Enzo Traverso.

21. I borrow this phrase from the title of Fredric Jameson’s 2009 book, Valences of the Dialectic (2009).

22. See Engels (1888/2000), Lukács’ contributions in the volume Aesthetics and Politics (Adorno et al., 2007), and Jameson (2013) for these important moments in the Marxist engagement with realism.

23. There are, of course, a number of qualifications to make here. It is not the case that realist narratives were no longer produced after the 1980s, but rather that irrealist literary modes began to be implicitly privileged both by the broader literary marketplace and by critics.

24. See Andrade (2009) for a discussion of the critical fortunes of realism in African literary studies. See Dalley (2014) for a recent inquiry into the role of the historical novel form in African and postcolonial fiction.