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Abstract
Literary histories are acts of synthesis, classification, evaluation, and ordering that are also often heavily invested in both nostalgia and ideology. The main challenge of a literary history is to construct interrelated historical and rhetorical series but in such a way as not to make them individually autonomous but mutually illustrative of the shifts and changes in the two domains. There is also a strong family resemblance between literary history and the history of ideas which makes an exercise such as this one especially fruitful as a way of reflecting upon the relationship between African letters and studies of Africa in general. This article introduces the main phases and emphases in African literary studies and is both historical and evaluative.
Notes
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Ato Quayson is a Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University. He earned his BA at the University of Ghana and his PhD from the University of Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge and the University of Toronto before coming to NYU and has published widely in African literature, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, disability studies, and urban studies, among others. His books include Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? (2000), Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007), and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014), He has also edited African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (with Tejumola Olaniyan; 2007), the 2-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (with Girish Daswani; 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (2016). He is the founding editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
Notes
1 What passes for chronology in accounts of African literary history may also be organized according to specific thematic emphases, as in Gikandi’s “Realism, Romance, and the Problem of African Literary History” (2012, 309–328), or from a more global and world literature perspective, which is what we find in Tejumola Olaniyan’s more polemical “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” (2016, 387–396). See also, Dathorne (Citation1974), Lazarus (Citation1990), Newell (Citation2013), and Irele (Citation2001). Irele and Gikandi’s 2-volume The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2008) brings together a range of new literary-historical accounts of the field, while Olaniyan and Quayson’s African Literary Theory and Criticism (2007) gathers together many of the rare-to-find classic texts in African literary criticism.
2 As Wendy Belcher has adroitly shown through Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson (2003) and elsewhere, Ethiopian Christianity was not merely a recipient of Western influences but also played its part in impacting upon both religious and literary productions in the West itself. For accounts of the impact of Christianity on Yoruba culture, see John Peel (Citation2001) and on South African native cultures and institutions, see Jean Comarroff and John Comarroff (1991 and 1997).
3 See especially the essays guest edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi “On African Science Fiction” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016). The issue contains essays by Magali Armillas-Tiseyra, Hugh Charles O’Connell, Ian P. MacDonald, and Brady Smith and cover a broad range of themes in African SF.
4 For the accusation, see Chinweizu et al.’s collection of essays, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, (1980) and Soyinka’s colorful response to them in “Neo-Tarzanism” (1975). the relationship between literature, the arts, and everyday life on the continentcentral character of Wangrin:droitly shows in
5 The Portuguese trade influence extended beyond West Africa and stretched through Angola and Mozambique and as far as the Cape of Good Hope at the very tip of South Africa. Krotoa (christened Eva by the Europeans) was an early interpreter who served the Dutch governor from the first days of their arrival at the Cape in 1652. She learned how to speak Dutch fluently and was also proficient in Portuguese for the obvious reason that it was the dominant trade language at the time. For Krotoa’s role in early colonial contact in South Africa, see and Quayson (Citation2007, 174–204).
6 On this, see Ato Quayson, “Still it Makes Me Laugh, No Time to Die: A Response,” PMLA 131.2 (2016): 528–537.
7 For a fuller analysis of Mujila’s novel, see Ato Quayson, “Shakara Babies and Locomotive Tales” (2016).
8 On this process, see especially Birgit Meyer. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
9 Harry Garuba. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society”. In Public Culture. Vol. 15, (2003): 261–285; also, Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction. London: Routledge, 1998, and Ato Quayson. “Magical Realism and the African Novel”. In The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel. Ed. Abiola Irele. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 159–176.
10 What I have described here as the re-enchantment of the familiar has also been taken by critics to represent the new discourse of new materialisms. Harry Garuba is cited as a great inspiration to the thinking on new materialisms. See the special issue on the topic edited by Rosemary J. Jolly and Alexander Fyfe in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (2017).
11 I want to give special thanks to Ayebia Clark, of Ayebia Publishers, for giving me an insider’s view of the shifts and changes in African literary publishing from its inception to present times through various conversations and personal communications over many years.
12 Becky Ayebia Clarke, personal communication. December 2018. I want to give special thanks to Ayebia for sharing various pieces of information with me regarding her time at Heinemann and the history of the Series in several conversations she and I have had about African publishing since the late 1990s. For more information on this redoubtable and innovative Africanist publisher, see www.ayebia.co.uk.
13 I use the singular formulation—genealogical accounting—only for rhetorical consistency because strictly speaking the longer a community has existed in the diaspora the more likely there will be multiple, if not contradictory forms of genealogical accounting. Genealogical accounting may also be differentiated in relation to class and gender, since these perspectives may dramatically alter the sense of what it is exactly that has been left behind. See Quayson (Citation2013).
14 Eli Rubinstein recounted this beautiful story in a lecture at the University of Toronto titled “Stories to Heal a Broken World”. 30 March 2011.
15 Indeed in one of the first reviews of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel, Nigerian writer Helon Habila accuses her of pandering to a Western desire for poverty pawn. See his review in The Guardian. 20 January Citation2013. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review/>. Last accessed 30 Dec. 2018. For fascinating comments on the culture of cars in Americanah and the symbolic role played by Lagos’s traffic congestion in the novel, see Lyndsey Greene-Simms (Citation2017, 1–30).