Of freedom and literature in Africa and the diaspora

Abstract

This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora. Read together, the essays presented in this introduction make up a rich tapestry, offering a set of reflections that map out the complex geo-histories of freedoms in Africa and an array of creative representations of this generative idea across the continent and in the diaspora. This diversity of texts and contexts allows for a wide-ranging critical exploration of a variety of genres, languages, cultures and historical periods. Areas of common ground across the ten essays include literature as a form of protest, creative ways of resisting repression, sidestepping to get around constraints, efforts to build networks of solidarity within and across communities and exploring what it means to be human within these reclaimed spaces.

Keywords:

• African literature
• freedom
• African diaspora
• protest
• emancipation
• liberation

Introduction

This special issue brings together a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora. The essays explore the generative concept of freedom across a range of genres, broadening our definition of “literature” to include forms of creative expression that include graphic novels, photo essays, erotica on digital platforms, and other less conventional genres such as librettos in African languages. The novel as a genre is discussed across a variety of contexts from queer narratives about coming out in the Maghreb to migrant narratives and speculative fiction. The series of ten essays collected here covers a lot of terrain geographically, as well. In Africa, the authors reflect on texts from Morocco and Algeria, Ethiopia and Zanzibar, Equatorial Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. In the diaspora, they explore migrant narratives in the United States, France and digital platforms open to Afrodescendent writers. This collection of essays on freedom similarly engages with different temporal frames, looking at works that deal with historical forms of oppression from slavery and colonialism to dictatorship and apartheid, all the way to contemporary manifestations of unfreedom in ostensibly free, democratic nations. Many of the articles also look to the past in order to set up critical sources of inspiration such as Ethiopian Pan-Africanism and Kongolese messianic traditions, while others consider how writers creatively imagine the future. This diversity of texts and contexts allows the editors to bring together literary criticism that deals with a variety of linguistic and cultural contexts to include Swahili, English, French and Spanish in addition to Arabic influences in the Maghreb and Kikongo in Congo-Brazzaville. Read together, these essays make up a rich tapestry, offering a set of reflections that map out the complex geo-histories of freedoms in Africa and an array of creative representations of this generative idea across the continent and in the diaspora.

Three significant areas of common ground can be tracked across the ten essays in this special issue: (1) sites of protest, (2) sidestepping as a maneuver to get around constraints, and (3) questions of community. The contributions by Arenberg, Boampong, Mhlambi and Taoua engage most explicitly with writing as a means of protest or as a weapon of resistance. These essays reference various forms of historical struggles, against slavery, colonialism, dictatorship, and explore ongoing efforts against current forms of unfreedom whether it is censorship or the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. Next, it is interesting to note how many times efforts to sidestep constraints come up across the papers in a variety of settings. In South Africa, Coundouriotis considers how Ernest Cole gets around apartheid’s attempt to control his movements, gaining access to spaces where he is not authorized to be and taking photos that he smuggles out of the country when he goes into exile. Boampong discusses a graphic novel to which three people contributed: one did so while living in exile and two others used pseudonyms to get around censorship and repression in Equatorial Guinea. Musila discusses novels where the author sidesteps the conventions of the Bildungsroman and migrant narratives to carve out space for a different way of migrating that allows for resistance to the gleam of American capitalism. Ncube considers how queer narratives sidestep Western conventions for coming out and offer counter-narratives that negotiate the process in keeping with the “specific geohistorical space of the Maghreb.” Diabate presents erotic literature that gets around the constraints of conventional literary institutions by using online publishing platforms. In so many ways, these essays explore concerted efforts and maneuvers that allow creatives to come to writing in defiance of attempts to constrain, limit or silence their voices. Finally, questions of community surface throughout the papers in this special issue including attempts to negotiate ways of belonging that nurture a greater sense of personal freedom, to build networks of solidarity within and across contexts, and to explore what it means to be human within these reclaimed spaces.

The authors draw on a wealth of critical sources to define freedom as a concept across different contexts. One reference that is cited in several essays in this special issue is Phyllis Taoua’s book, African Freedom. How Africa Responded to Independence (2018). She proposes three types of freedom:

I explore meaningful freedom as a complex idea that is multifaceted and includes more than political self-determination or national sovereignty; it involves different kinds of freedoms that are interconnected and mutually dependent. I propose a preliminary discussion of three types of freedom: (1) instrumental freedoms pertain to tools that serve a purpose; political and civil rights and liberties such as voting, free speech, freedom of the press, the right to organize, and access resources; (2) substantive freedoms are the ability to make choices, as in a spouse or one’s faith, and the capacity to develop one’s potential through education, work, and social opportunities in order to improve one’s quality of life; and (3) existential freedoms are intangible; they relate to the spiritual realm, to ethical values, and to the psyche as in the absence of alienation (24).

These types of freedom are, at times, implicitly and explicitly referenced. In Eleni Coundouriotis’s paper on Ernest Cole’s photo essay, House of Bondage (1966), she argues that the photojournalist crosses the threshold of meaningful freedom, calling attention to his complex exploration of freedom beyond its political form. Innocentia J. Mhlambi, in her discussion of Black Opera, considers these aspects of freedom in relation to a meaningful reinvigoration of movements for transnational black solidarity to counter the various manifestations of neoliberalism. Naminata Diabate, in her presentation of a growing corpus of erotica published online, argues that the way writers make use of these platforms expands their instrumental freedoms and creates new spaces for them to creatively express their sexuality as they see fit and thus to enjoy greater substantive freedoms.

Meg Arenberg, in her essay on the Zanzibari poet Mohamed Ghassani Khelef, references an interview with Tejumola Olaniyan in which he defines freedom in Yoruba and reflects more broadly on the concept across contexts. Olaniyan’s interview is part of an audiovisual archive Documenting Freedom in Africa (africanfreedom.arizona.edu) that was created by Phyllis Taoua in collaboration with Jean-Marie Teno, who filmed and helped conduct the interviews. Taoua’s inspiration for the project came from a conversation she had with Karin Barber at an homage in Bordeaux for Alain Ricard in 2017. They discussed the role that African languages should play in informing our cultural criticism, which prompted Taoua’s interest in creating an open-access platform that could facilitate our understanding of the concept of freedom in different African languages and their cultural relevance across contexts.

Elsewhere, Tejumola Olaniyan has made salient contributions to the conceptual definition of freedom in his contribution to the archive Documenting Freedom in Africa as well as in his essay “Africa, Post-Global: A Reaffirmation” (2017). Olaniyan, for instance, makes a distinction between attached and unattached freedoms. With this, he proposes that there are broadly two types of freedom: attached freedoms derive from an individual’s protected status as a member of a group, while unattached freedoms are universal human rights to which every individual is inherently entitled. Olaniyan also rightly claims that enslaved Africans were co-creators of the Western value of freedom by virtue of their bodies in circulation during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. With this bold proposition, he clears space for people of African descent worldwide to see the idea of freedom as an essential aspect of their own legacy and not a uniquely Western value. In this volume, Musila’s essay draws on Olaniyan’s reflections on how Black people’s bondage inspired Enlightenment thought on freedom, precisely because their status emblematized the horrors of unfreedom.

Another recurring reference is Rinaldo Walcott’s recent monograph The Long Enlightenment: Toward Black Freedom (2021), where he argues that globally, Black life is lived in an ongoing state of unfreedom, despite repeated cycles of emancipation across history. Where Walcott considers freedom to mark “an individual and collective desire to be in common and in difference in a world that is nonhierarchical and nonviolent,” his concept of the long emancipation speaks to cyclical histories of interdiction of freedom for Black people across the globe. The recurrent motif of Black fungibility across the world in recent decades—whether directly through police brutality in the United States and desperate migrants left to drown in boats on the Mediterranean Sea; or indirectly through behind-the-scenes undermining of newly-independent African nations’ freedom dreams at the height of the Cold War—bears witness to Walcott’s theorization of Black freedom as perpetually trapped in a future-yet-to-come. While Pan-Africanism is one such liberation project whose visions of freedom remain largely postponed, Musila’s essay in this volume points to African migrants’ provocative repurposing of pan-African sociality as an alternative articulation of freedom in Dinaw Mengestu’s oeuvre.

Walcott’s notion of the long emancipation also brings to mind Simon Gikandi’s critique of the paradoxes of globalization as both a discourse of possibility and crisis. In an essay on the interface between postcoloniality and globalization, Gikandi laments:

While we live in a world defined by cultural and economic flows cross formally entrenched national boundaries, the world continues to be divided in stark terms between its ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ sectors. It is precisely because of the starkness of this division that the discourse of globalization seems to be perpetually caught between two competing narratives, one of celebration, the other of crisis. (Gikandi 629).

Globalization’s paradox of crisis and celebration is a product of what Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter terms a liberal monohumanist monopoly on who is considered human, resulting in “ever-increasing degrees of human immiseration based on increasing degrees of racially, socially and religiously stratified economic inequality” (Wynter & McKittrick 66). Gikandi and Wynter’s insights are generative in making sense of the forms of unfreedom produced by neoliberalism for its precariat classes across the world; a question picked up in the current collection by Mhlambi and Musila’s essays.

In view of the capacious freedom dreams of Africans and Afro-diasporic people in the twentieth century, a significant body of scholarship has been preoccupied with the afterlives of incomplete revolutionary projects, and what the residue of these utopian projects can teach us about the pursuit of freedom. Among these works are Arif Dirlik’s The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (1997) on the limits of postcolonial theory, David Scott’s Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014) on the sabotaged Grenada revolution, Jennifer Wenzel’s Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (2009) on the Xhosa cattle killing and Andrew van der Vlies’ Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (2017) on the shortfalls of post-apartheid South Africa’s freedoms. For Dirlik, “in an ideological situation where the future has been all but totally colonised by the ideology of capital, we can ill afford to overlook critical perspectives afforded by past alternatives that have been suppressed by the history of capital” (Dirlik 4). He proposes this approach in the spirit of “keeping alive alternative visions of society that may yet open up the future in new ways” rather than being regressive or nostalgic (ibid.) In varied ways, most of the contexts discussed in the essays that follow feature partly failed freedom dreams. These essays grapple with the work of activating new possibilities for freedom, on the back of incomplete liberation projects; effectively asking with van der Vlies: “how do bodies of thought imagine a future beyond or inspire of imagined failure?” How do we re-read narratives of failed futures as “repositories of hope for the future?” (van der Vlies 1). In many of the essays, writers, artists and other cultural producers distil registers of freedom from the ashes of past liberation projects, and use these to fuel alternative visions of other futures.

Running parallel to these debates on revolutionary liberation projects and their utopian surplus is another cluster of scholarly work that zones in on versions of freedom in neoliberal time in Africa. Here, freedom is imagined in the grammars of consumption of particular calibers of commodities, services and experiences associated with affluence, which enable particular modes of subject formation. To be free is to be able to consume, it is to be included in the afore-mentioned framework of neoliberal definitions of the human as favorably located within the economic grid. These understandings of freedom are explored in a growing body of work in the field of African critical luxury studies. Scholars such as Mehita Iqani—in African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics (2019) and Simidele Dosekun in Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture (2020)—explore the role of consumption in staging demands for visibility and crafting gendered and racialized subjectivities in market-based contexts where aspiration, access and self-fashioning form indices of freedom.

Under duress: representing oppression

In her contribution, Eleni Coundouriotis discusses Ernest Cole’s seminal photo essay, House of Bondage (1966). She locates freedom in the documentarian’s creative effort and in his aim to bring forth the fullness of African lives under the oppression of apartheid in South Africa. She provides historical context on Cole’s contributions to Drum and the Rand Daily Mail as a freelance journalist between 1958 and 1966. She states, “And, although the freedom Cole refers to is distinct from political freedom, it crosses the threshold of a ‘meaningful freedom’ (Taoua 24).” With this, she calls attention to Cole’s complex exploration of the many facets of freedom beyond political self-determination. Coundouriotis also considers the paradox of Cole’s experience of a loss of creative freedom while living in exile in the United States after 1966, compared to his productive experience working in South Africa. This paradox surfaces the essential importance of location (geographical, spatial) and the circumstances of oppression (direct, indirect), two elements interwoven throughout the essays in this volume. Coundouriotis offers a perceptive, nuanced reflection on how Cole’s wounded belonging at home inspires his perspective on space and context and shapes his articulation of an African-centered ethical perspective. To convey black life in House of Bondage, this photojournalist exploits the tensions between text and image that characterize the photo essay form, setting up his images so that they exceed the conventional function of documentary. Cole’s images of subjects reading, for instance, evoke their yearning for freedom by depicting them in a state of thought that indicates imaginative engagement with the world beyond their confinement. The result is an innovative novelistic work that combines photography and narrative to give a compelling account of black African lives under white minority rule, while representing the space of interiority as freedom. “Thus, Cole’s work is important,” she argues, “not only for what it portrays in its images but also for the possibility of imagination, a desire for thinking, that it awakens.” She goes on to consider Cole’s contribution within the field of South African literature, including in relation to Zakes Mda, Nadine Gordimer and Alex La Guma. She notes, for instance, that “Cole’s perspective is a corrective on La Guma. It shows less conviction in a politics of liberation and a more intentional grasp of the limited freedom that can be found in the present.” While living in South Africa, Cole documented his lived reality and the experiences of the black community by clawing back whatever freedom he could—to live, to imagine, to create—which was a powerful challenge, both aesthetically and ethically, to apartheid’s very foundation. Coundouriotis’s essay comes at a time when this historically important work continues to attract noteworthy attention with an exhibit featuring Cole’s House of Bondage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 2023 and a newly reissued edition of the book by Aperture in 2022.

Phyllis Taoua’s essay revisits Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel La Vie et demie (1979)—translated into English as Life and a Half (2011) in the Global African Voices series—with an eye for how his formal experimentation presents writing as a weapon of resistance. Taoua notes that in interviews, Tansi emphasized his understanding of writing as a mode of space-making, of creating possibilities, of “inventing freedom,” as he terms it. She sets up her argument by considering how the novel’s critical reception has emphasized its representation of dictatorship and not attended to the narrative’s more existential meditations on freedom. To get at these issues, she centers the relationship between writing and freedom as a thread woven throughout the novel and structures her argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer in the text. Her discussion engages with literary criticism by Lydie Moudileno, Achille Mbembe, Magalī Armillas-Tiserya and others. But the critical approach taken is also informed by her fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville and scholarship on the Kongo people from art history to political anthropology. Taoua draws on archival materials (photographs, prayers, interviews) and a historical appreciation of Kongo artefacts and their cultural meanings as sources of critical insight for understanding the writer’s syncretic creative repertoire. This allows her to expand the critical frame for explicating Tansi’s aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Her close reading of the novel’s infamous opening scene, which is a violent mise-en-scène of power, aims to reveal how elements that derive from Kongo ritual using nkisi n’kondi are figuratively used to present writing as a form of spiritual resistance. She then goes onto to consider other forms of writing in the novel. For instance, writing is presented as an instrument to advance the cause of freedom and justice in the public square and can be seen as an act of civic engagement. Writing as a means of creative expression and self-definition also surfaces in the narrative but remains in the background, as an outlet for Chaïdana who writes about solitude and being, and for Layisho, who escapes the physical confines of his cage through imaginative wandering. She finds that recurring aliases for the writer are fictional projections of Sony Labou Tansi in the narrative that embody different facets of his imaginative engagement in the Kongo people’s struggle for freedom. Her essay examines freedom as a generative concept that can broaden our critical parameters, bringing interrelated experiences of freedom into focus in the same frame.

In her contribution, Joana Boampong discusses Ramón Esono Ebalé’s graphic novel La pesadilla de Obi (2014; Obi’s nightmare) that satirizes the longstanding dictator in Equatorial Guinea, which brings attention to the Hispanophone tradition that is little explored within African literary criticism. Boampong observes, “Given its unique position of straddling both African and Hispanic historical traditions, it is intriguing that for a long time Hispanophone literature generally remained outside the focus of critical debates on topical issues in both Africa and Latin America. Nevertheless, given its historical antecedents and especially the trajectory of its literary production, the contributions that Hispanophone literature makes to questions surrounding censorship, freedom, liberty, nationalism, and self-governance warrant critical attention.” She provides historical context, indicating that, since gaining independence from Spain in 1968, Equatorial Guinea has only known two autocratic regimes and is currently headed by Africa’s longest-serving dictator. Under these circumstances, the question of freedom understandably weighs heavily on the literature in this country. She deals with criticism on dictatorship, such as Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and Antonio Gramsci’s related work on hegemony. Boampong also engages with literary critics including Joaquim Mbomio Bacheng who describes Hispanophone literature as “a song of freedom in its eternal quest for a new world,” which aptly characterizes Equatoguinean writers’ response to the stranglehold that dictatorship has over the country. Ebalé is a contemporary Hispanophone author renowned for his activism and visually arresting texts, whose work confronts oppression under dictatorship most forcefully. Boampong undertakes a close reading of Ebalé’s graphic novel that employs the power of both visual and written texts to fashion a new status for Obi, its dictator-turned-ordinary-citizen protagonist. Integral to this graphic novel’s critical lens are the subversive effect of laughter and an ironical subversion of gendered norms, whereby the dictator becomes a submissive man who is bossed around by his wife. This reversal of domestic roles of domination takes on evident political resonances. To avoid censorship and repression, Ebalé lived in exile and two other contributors assumed pseudonyms. With this graphic novel, we have another engagement with the relationship between image and text, as we saw in the paper on Cole’s House of Bondage, that makes use of an unconventional genre to criticize an oppressive regime. Boampong argues that the deconstruction of the image of the dictator in La pesadilla de Obi serves as a basis for compelling readers to formulate a counter-discourse that could result in destabilizing established notions about Obiang and imagining new paths toward freedom.

Gestures: reaching back, engaging the present

Meg Arenberg’s paper examines the poetry and philosophy of self-exiled Zanzibari poet Mohamed Ghassani Khelef. Arenberg is interested in Ghassani’s poetic meditation on the question of the struggle for substantive freedom, both in his home country of Zanzibar and in the diaspora, in this context, Germany. Like Tansi, Ghassani holds deep conviction about the liberating potential of writing and the imagination. Here, Arenberg considers Ghassani’s self-published poetry collections as both literary artifacts and political interventions committed to protest and provocation, at significant risk to the author, in a repressive political environment. Equally notably, both writers gesture at censorship as having cultural associations with occult powers that entail physical harm to a person’s throat, as a soul-destructive act. Arenberg demonstrates how Ghassani’s poetry participates in the crafting of shared visions of new political formations that blend together the frameworks of belonging that preceded colonial domination as well as a selection of those that inspired the Zanzibar revolution. Further, the paper argues that Ghassani’s multi-layered evocations of slavery and subservience across his poetry collection tables a strong protest against conditions of unfreedom in Zanzibar, while laying claim to forms of belonging and human freedom that authorize free pursuit of career paths abroad while remaining invested in, and protective of, freedoms of belonging and speech back in Zanzibar. Ultimately, Ghassani proposes, the will to resist and refuse subservience is a definitive feature of our humanity. In Ghassani’s poetry, unfreedom and enslavement are understood as, among other things, “being in thrall of foreign ways, and allowing oneself to be ideologically dominated.” Arenberg reads Ghassani’s invocation of his kinship and birthright to Zanzibar/Pemba as underlining both “territorial and cultural belonging as essential components of freedom.” Here, Arenberg writes, Ghassani’s rejection of associations with enslavement is neither an aspiration to power nor self-distancing from those with slave ancestry; rather, it emphasizes that asserting belonging is “necessary for meaningful freedom—and with it political rights against the threat of dissolution—whether in the form of Western assimilation or political oppression from Tanzania’s union government and its ruling party.” Arenberg further tracks Ghassani’s mobilization of the vocabulary of independence and revolution and interprets it as pointing to “a need to reinscribe these terms with new meanings, and to articulate his political dissent in terms of continuity with Ghassani’s harnessing of the discursively loaded language of uhuru [independence] and mapinduzi [revolution] to describe his own poetic practice point to a need to reinscribe these terms with new meanings, and to articulate his political dissent in terms of continuity with the incontestable values of anticolonial struggle.”

Innocentia J. Mhlambi’s paper explores Black Opera’s engagements with the legacies of colonialism and the afterlives of black liberation projects in the contexts of the United States, Britain and South Africa. Mhlambi’s essay demonstrates that neoliberal capitalism and contradictions of black liberatory discourses have given rise to black identities whose outlook disavows values that once bound the black race around common goals of social and economic justice. Focusing on three operas from the three regions—Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner (premiered in the United States in 2005), Shirley Thompson’s The Woman Who Refused to Dance (premiered in the United Kingdom in 2007), and Mandla Langa and Hugh Masekela’s Milestones (premiered in South Africa in 1999)—Mhlambi is interested in the affordances and limitations of black solidarity and black liberation politics in the face of neoliberal capital’s assaults on such solidarities and its ongoing production of social and economic precarity. In her reading, Black Operatic imaginaries underscore the urgency of a meaningful reinvigoration of movements for transnational black solidarity in order to counter a sustained undermining of black dignity by the various manifestations of neoliberal politics.

Grace A. Musila’s essay reads Dinaw Mengestu’s three novels—The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014)—as a loosely interconnected trilogy of Ethiopian immigrants’ experiences of the United States. Centering less canonical writing that often gets overlooked, Musila’s contribution “explores the questions Mengestu’s trilogy poses about aspirational templates of freedom for migrant communities. [She] suggest[s] that across the three novels, Mengestu’s narrator-protagonists interrogate the freedom claims embedded in the neoliberal promises of the American dream while staging provocative forms of refusal, which reconfigure the conventional coordinates of the postcolonial migrant novel.” To set the stage for her critical reflection on Mengestu’s counter-hegemonic representations of migration, Musila revisits Ethiopia’s history and considers both the nation’s status in pan-African discourses from the 1930s as well as the Red Terror bloodbath between 1976 and 1978, costing thousands of lives and triggering a massive displacement of Ethiopians to Europe and North America. She then interprets how Mengestu stages the migrant’s refusal across his three novels and the forms of alternative freedoms these refusals afford his protagonists, but also the price they pay for these refusals, in the shape of a repeated sense of paralysis and lethargy, that simultaneously allows them rich metafictional insights into the cracks of neoliberal capital’s promises and its impossibilities. Musila reads critical interventions by Sylvia Wynter, Tejumola Olaniyan, and Aziz Rana alongside each other to draw attention to fractures in American conceptions of freedom, which Mengestu’s characters variously spotlight with their subversive anti-conformism. She articulates her own critical synthesis with the claim, “Atlantic slavery, colonialism, and Euro-American sabotage of meaningful sovereignty and economic prosperity across Africa render it deeply ironic for Africans to evoke Euro-America as sites of freedom, as does the reality of vicious anti-blackness and ongoing interdiction of freedom for Afro-descended and other minoritized citizens in Euro-America.” Written against the grain of American capitalism, her essay offers a perceptive account of how these young men’s life trajectories sidestep the conventional frames of the Bildungsroman, repeatedly foreclosing heterosexual futurity while adopting pan-African frames of community with other young African men in their lifeworlds. Musila concludes by returning to Pan-Africanism as a productive lens for reading this trilogy, “In these circumstances, friendship between the men and their fellow Africans, bound together by a pan-African ethos of brotherhood, holds out hope for a politics of care, empathy, and community, despite the ongoing decay of Selassie’s formal Pan-Africanism, that once championed the liberation of Africa and all Afro-descended people.”

Explorations: the boundaries of freedom

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra reads fiction from the African diaspora—Deji Bryce Olukotun’s After the Flare (2017) and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” (2017)—alongside Emmanuel Dongala’s “Jazz et vin de palme” (1970) and argues that the contemporary works of speculative fiction evince a sense of crisis about the possibility of the future. Adopting a comparative approach, the author brings recent diasporic writing in English into conversation with a Congolese story in French from the 1970s. Armillas-Tiseyra draws on a range of critical interventions from Sylvia Wynter to Rinaldo Walcott to “chart the ways in which ideologies that sustained the transatlantic trade in enslaved people as well as the colonization of large parts of the African continent—instituted via a racialization of the very idea of the human in Western modernity—continue to condition Black unfreedom in the present.” The essay continues by exploring how both Arimah and Olukotun proffer future worlds that are hardly different from the present but in which current conditions of exploitation and inequality are magnified. The author argues that, rather than being the symptom of a creative impasse that cannot imagine a world beyond the domination of capital, these attenuated futures function as counter-futurisms, facilitating critical meditation on the question of freedom in the present as well as in speculative futures in a manner consonant with what Dongala achieves in his more comical approach. As part of her discussion, the author reflects on questions of genre—speculative fiction, science fiction, Afrofuturism—and engages with their cultural assumptions and critical implications. It is striking that, for all three writers across the decades and contexts that separate them, freedom is a project that extends well beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and calls for a larger epistemic break. To offer a conceptual definition of freedom that also frames temporality, Armillas-Tiseyra observes, “…Walcott argues, Black freedom is different: it is an epistemic disruption, an irruptive force that rejects the linear and entails a fundamental reorganization of what it means to be human. It is a global and radical reorientation, from which “new registers of life would appear” (The Long Emancipation 5). This essay echoes the contributions by Coundouriotis and Boampong when Armillas-Tiseyra suggests that the possibilities for future freedoms, “is a fundamentally speculative project, which must be carried out beyond the limits of the text, interpolating the reader as an active agent in that imagining.”

At the center of Polo Moji’s paper is a reading of Marie Ndiaye’s work, alongside the sociological thought of her brother Pap NDiaye, to interpret the tensions between blackness and Frenchness as mutually exclusive identities in France. Mojo suggests that NDiaye’s work makes a claim to blackness as French, rather than Francophone. In a context marked by an exclusionary lexicon of migrancy—issus de immigration [of migrant origin] or immigrés de la seconde génération [second-generation immigrants]—that displaces black French citizens to foreign origins, a form of contingent belonging emerges for writers and broadly people, who claim black French identity, as opposed to Franchophone identity. Here, “French” represents insiders with unqualified claims to belonging while “Francophone” denotes outsiders and speaks to cultural/linguistic inclusion intertwined with exclusion from French identity. Against this background, Moji reads NDiaye as offering important insights into “mechanisms of racialization that are particular to France and the Francophone world.” The paper connects “structural and everyday racism to racialized imaginaries and discourses which cast blackness in France as necessarily other due to ancestry, culture, or kinship.” In the contexts of France then, Blackness becomes a social category of difference, that produces multiple forms of unfreedom, including forbidding full claims to French identity. Through a reading of blackness, métissage (biracial/mixed-race) identities, and kinship in NDiaye’s novel LaDivine and her play, Papa doit manger, the paper explores the work of literature in “problematizing the ethnocentric conception of French identity as white and western European.” Moji identifies NDiaye’s blurring of blackness as an important intervention that reflects on the pursuit of freedom through racial passing, on one hand, while inviting us to “transcend an interracial conception of liminality as a state of unbelonging.”

Gibson Ncube’s contribution turns to queer writing from the Maghreb, focusing on the use of autofiction to meditate on the coming-out trope and its implications in the Maghrebi context. Discussing the work of Moroccans Rachid O. and Abdellah Taia as well and the Franco-Algerian Nina Bouraoui, the paper demonstrates how the autofictional mode creates space for self-writing and self-fictionalisation, and broadly, the freedom to break the silence around their tabooed sexual identities. For these writers then, writing is a practice of freedom, by responding subversively to the silencing and tabooing of queer experiences. Importantly, Ncube argues, these writers use auto-fiction as an extended metaphor of coming out, but simultaneously write beyond the seeming centrality of coming out to queer identities; by demonstrating their navigation of the complex social context, which enjoys a high tolerance of queer identities while, at the same time, retaining the pressures of narrow legal and religious apparatuses that delegitimize queerness. This paper demonstrates the forms of epistemic claims to context-specific freedoms in the Maghreb, where the Euro-American framework of coming out of the closet as a once-off self-claiming would be dissonant. The essay draws on Denis Provencher’s notion of “coming out à l’orientale or coming out Eastern style” as a gradual, dialogic process of articulating difference in non-confrontational modes; paired with Ncube’s own theorisation of reading Maghrebi queerness as necessitating the decoding of silences and skin. Where Euro-American discourses of coming out prioritize naming and publicizing queerness, Ncube writes, Maghrebi autofiction sidesteps the need for naming and publicity. Instead, it takes the geohistorical and cultural realities of the Maghreb seriously, where acknowledgement of differences, and negotiating such difference must be worked out “through and within silent, stifled, and distorted histories about what queerness is and especially what it means to be queer, Arab, and Muslim within the specific geohistorical space of the Maghreb.” Ncube reads this mediation of queer desire through writing as exemplifying “a practice of freedom which sets out to make queer bodies not just visible but also discursively legible.”

In her essay, Naminata Diabate explores a growing corpus of recent erotic writing by authors of African descent, which has not yet received much critical attention. This new literary writing is largely published on digital platforms, effectively sidestepping the gatekeepers of mainstream literary establishments. The author asks a series of questions that probe the relationship between means and ends: What is the conceptual repertoire the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom on these platforms? What are the discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? Diabate observes how Léonora Miano, a Cameroonian author based in France, led the way in rejecting the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently led writers to suppress their sexuality. In her rebellion against that repressed form of self-alienation and her striving toward poetic sexual freedom, Miano commissioned and edited two anthologies: Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. The essay considers how, since these publications, an investment in further correcting the silence around sex(ual) pleasure is echoed and amplified in a growing number of digital anthologies. She develops her literary argument in relation to other women writers such as Buchi Emecheta and by drawing on critical interventions by Patricia McFadden, Achille Mbembe and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Diabate argues that this genre and its current success is all about freedom, drawing on editorial materials relative to these digital collections, Phyllis Taoua’s reflections on freedom, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story “The Oink in Doinker.” Diabate shows how in combating moralists through the distribution of their erotic literature online, writers make use of these platforms as sources of instrumental freedom that expand their liberty of expression to challenge repressive norms. Using these tools to advance the cause of greater sexual freedoms, they begin to practice and aspire to new substantive freedoms by presenting a radical vision of sexual permissiveness. The author argues that this experimentation offers readers a refreshing window onto the possibilities for expanding the capacity to make choices that will define their sexual and lives as they see fit. Their individual practices and collective aspirations express an insuppressible creative resolve to achieve sexual self-determination, which nonetheless belies the still tenuous relationship between instrumental and substantive freedoms as they relate to human sexuality in African societies, and elsewhere around the world, today.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phyllis Clark Taoua

Phyllis Taoua is a Professor at the University of Arizona where she teaches courses on Africa and the diaspora, including the French-speaking world. She is the author of African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and curator of the audiovisual archive Documenting Freedom in Africa (africanfreedom.arizona.edu).

Grace A. Musila

Grace A. Musila teaches African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (James Currey, 2015). She is also the editor of the Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture (Routledge, 2023), Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (HSRC Press, 2020) and co-editor, with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga, of Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2011).