Afterword

ABSTRACT

I very much admire the engagement demonstrated by the essays featured here, all of which I’ve enjoyed reading and from many of which I’ve learned a considerable amount. For the most part, however, I won’t be referring explicitly to these essays in what follows. Instead, I’d like to use the opportunity presented to me – I must extend my thanks to Alexander Fyfe for inviting me to write this Afterword – to make a few general observations about the issues implicated in this special issue of African Identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• African(ist) literary criticism
• postcolonial studies
• (critique of) Eurocentrism
• third-worldism

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Lazarus

Neil Lazarus is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His most recent book isCombined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, collaboratively written by the Warwick Research Collective (Liverpool UP, 2015). Previous publications include The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge UP, 2011), Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (CUP, 1999) and Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (Yale UP, 1990). Edited volumes include The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2004) and (with Crystal Bartolovich) Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (CUP, 2002). He works in the fields of postcolonial and world literary studies, with particular interests in Marxism, globalisation and imperialism, critical theory, modernity and modernism, realism, and the novel. His current project is Into Our Labours: Work and Literary Form in World-Literary Perspective.