Oppressive Sameness and the Novels We Need: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Challenge to Postcolonial Readerly Desires in the Twenty-First Century

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In a forthcoming study of 66 African literature syllabi, Lily Saint and Bhakti Shringarpure report that 25 include Nervous Conditions; none include The Book of Not. Data cited with the permission of the authors.

2 Fuller identifies This Mournable Body incorrectly as the ‘sequel’ to Nervous Conditions (1989).

3 See Krishnan (2009) for a smart reading of Adichie’s complex position in a twenty-first-century landscale of African literary celebrity.

4 See Slaughter (2007).

5 See ‘Decolonial Temporalities in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not,’ forthcoming in Research in African Literatures.

6 I borrow the term ‘problem-space’ from David Scott, whose fullest articulation of its meaning appears in his 2004 Conscripts of Modernity.

7 See, for example, Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), and Happiness (2018); Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2019); and Petinah Gappa’s Zimbabwe Trilogy.