“A Continent Learns to Tell its Story at Last”: Notes on the Caine Prize

Abstract

This article examines the role of the Caine Prize in the production, marketing, and reception of African anglophone writing, and argues that the prize participates in a system of postcolonial knowledge industry that both values and marginalizes postcolonial texts, as Graham Huggan, Sarah Brouillette and Timothy Brennan, among others, have analysed. Working with Huggan’s notion of the “postcolonial exotic” and Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of literary legitimation and artistic value, it considers the social, economic and cultural issues surrounding the prize, raising questions about the status of the prize as a legitimizing agent for African English-language fiction.

Keywords:

• Caine Prize
• literary prizes
• African literature
• literary legitimation
• the postcolonial exotic

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Biennial Conference of the African Studies Association of the UK at the University of Oxford, on 17 September 2010.

2. ee also the prize’s Latin motto, Ex Africa semper aliquid novi (meaning, approximately, “out of Africa there’s always stuff that’s new”), which apparently shakes off the colonial view of Africa as locked in the past, and emphasizes its dynamic realities.

3. Osondu’s remark must not be taken at face value since there are, in fact, book publishers in Nigeria, even if their ability to publish books is limited by the poor market.

4. In Nigeria, the publishing houses Kachifo/Farafina and Cassava Republic have re-published many Nigerian diasporic authors who have made a name in the West.

5. This is Jodi Bieber’s portrait of 18-year-old Bibi Aisha, an Afghan woman whose nose and ears were sliced-off by her husband in a case of Taliban-administered justice. It appeared on the July 2010 cover of Time magazine.