Sisyphean Selves: The African Novel of Ideas roundtable response

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Translation originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Originally published in France as Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Librairie Gallimard, 1942. Accessed online at: https://www2.hawaii.edu/∼freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf. Pg 2.

2 Camus, 6.

3 Camus, 7.

4 As Allais suggests, Walter Mignolo is the standard-bearer of this all-encompassing and historically fluid version of “decoloniality,” which works from Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth century toward a grand juxtaposition of modernity (Western, hegemonic, and violent) and communality (local, marginalized, and salvational). See, for example, recent books including The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Duke UP, 2021) and, with Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Duke UP, 2018), as well as the briefer second part of Christopher Mattison’s 2012 interview with Mignolo on the blog Critical Legal Thinking (https://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/05/02/delinking-decoloniality-dewesternization-interview-with-walter-mignolo-part-ii/). Much ink has already been spilled on Mignolo and the larger decolonial movement’s shortcomings, including, most relevant here, an insufficient degree of skepticism toward “local” cultural movements. For an outstanding recent critical treatment, see Kavish Chetty’s review of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations in Social Dynamics 49.2 (2023): 386–391.

5 See Ngai “The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas” in The Paris Review, published June 25, 2020 (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/).

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Notes on contributors

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where she is also Senior Editor of the journal ELH. She is the author of two monographs: The African Novel of Ideas (Princeton 2021) and South African Literature’s Russian Soul (Bloomsbury 2015), as well as coeditor of the forthcoming critical edition of J.E. Casely Hayford’s novel Ethiopia Unbound (MSU Press, 2024). In 2021 she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.