Ben Lindfors and his palavers with African literature

Abstract

The article discusses Bernth Lindfors’s unique contributions to the field of Anglophone African literary studies, contextualizes his methodology, and discusses the controversies that arose over a few of his interventions to preserve and canonize early African literature. His commitment to the field is unequivocal and the journal he founded, Research in African Literatures, continues to exhibit the brilliance and promise of African literature and literary studies.

Keywords:

• Institutionalization
• inventory
• manuscripts
• preservation
• field formation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For Lindfors’s account of how he was introduced to African literature, see “‘Beware the Ides of March’” in African Literary Manuscripts and African Archives (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2020). I lean on this collection in which it was republished heavily since the essays written over years provide an overarching view of his trajectory in the field.

2 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/portuguese-english/palavra

3 There are some negative connotations to the common definition of palaver, but academic palavers are more serious and intentional. Lindfors positions himself as a mediator and interlocutor setting up conversations with African authors and texts as a primary strategy for defining the then newly developing field of Anglophone African literary studies. He coedited, with doctoral students Ian Munro, Richard Priebe, and Reinhard Sander, a collection titled Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1972); he would have other collections of interviews with titles such as Africa Talks Back (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 2002); Toyin Falola and Barbara Harlow would edit two volumes in his honor, one of which was titled Palavers of African Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002). The echo of palaver in titles related to Lindfors’s work places him squarely in the moment of the 2019 ALA conference, which marked the institutionalization of African literature as a sustained, deliberative process of such dialogues, however asymmetrical, however fractious in their proceedings and field formations. Research in African Literatures, founded by Lindfors in 1970, was a major intervention in establishing the field through scholarly discourse, often, like this special focus, initiated by conferences papers and developed into articles.

4 The quotation is from Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1971), 324.

5 It is characteristic of Lindfors to enjoy pranking South African censorship with Brutus but also to provide information on papers and manuscripts, including, more soberly, where to locate the full transcript of Brutus’s trial in South Africa. See Lindfors’s two essays on Brutus in African Literary Manuscripts that Salah D. Hassan discusses at more length in this cluster of articles.

6 As Caryl Phillips puts it, “the evidence of the greatest rogues’ gallery in the world is the bowels of the British museum [sic] where there is pillaged art from every conceivable place you can think of. I don’t want people to feel guilty about that; I just want them to come clean” (41).

7 A long overdue note of thanks to the librarians and archivists who care for the materials and enthusiastically assist the scholar in research: our work would be impossible without their passion and generosity. I have often been staggered by the meticulous responses to my inquiries and the help in making materials available, reminding me that scholarship is indeed supported by fellowship.

8 For a searing but compassionate critique of Nigerian complicity in smuggling antiquities see Okey Ndibe, Foreign Gods, Inc. (New York, NY: Soho, 2014). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (New York, NY: Anchor, 2013) censures both U.S. and Nigerian universities, the former for their elitism, their veiled racism, and the performative politics of virtue signaling, the latter for their indifference to serious infrastructural and pedagogical problems that lead to the hemorrhaging of middle-class scholars and students. As Obinze bitterly notes in the novel, civil war and hunger are not the only reasons to flee to the North. There is “the kind of poverty that crushed human souls . . . [compounding] the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness” (341).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Supriya M. Nair

Supriya M. Nair is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is the author of two monographs, Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History and Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours. She is also co-editor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism and editor of Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial, feminist, diaspora (Caribbean, African, South Asian), environmental humanities, and cultural studies.