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Overview
Alert to the ways in which critical theory and imaginative literature can enrich each other, African Literature and Social Change reframes the ongoing project of African literature. Concentrating on texts that are not usually considered together—writings by little-known black missionaries, so called “black whitemen,” and better-known 20th century intellectuals and creative writers—Olakunle George shows the ways in which these writings have addressed notions of ethnicity, nation, and race and how the debates need to be rehistoricized today. George presents Africa as a site of complex desires and contradictions, refashioning the way African literature is positioned within current discussions of globalism, diaspora, and postcolonialism.
“A bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.” —Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste
“A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle George’s African Literature and Social Change is dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it.” —Comparative Literature Studies
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253029324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Olakunle George is Associate Professor at Brown University. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of the Novel.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora
Much has happened in Anglo-American literary theory and cultural criticism over the last four decades. Most recently, arguments about paradigms of world literature, transnationalism, and diaspora have accompanied institutional changes and redirections. This development testifies to events in the world at large and is symptomatic of larger social anxieties. With the emergence of literary theory in the 1970s, literary criticism was challenged to reconsider established traditions of narrow formalism and ahistorical aestheticism. But theory did not just happen because literary scholars suddenly looked inward and had a change of heart. Theory occurred within a broad ferment of world-historical developments, such as civil rights and antiwar activism in the United States, the anti-apartheid movement, and guerilla resistance against Portuguese colonial holdouts in Africa. The conceptual advances opened up in the first wave of theory — that is to say, theory as it took shape in the 1970s and 1980s — thus emerged in an atmosphere of real political and institutional overdetermination. In turn, theory feeds into, even as it is reshaped by, critical paradigms designed to address the particularity of nonwhite populations and non- normative sexualities.
The postcolonial theory of the 1980s and 1990s is to be located squarely within these institutional developments. Diverse and internally contentious as the postcolonial eruption into critical theory was, we will find beneath the chaos of methods and vocabularies some version of the following: (1) a deconstruction of origins and essentialized identities, (2) a critique of colonial epistemic violence, and (3) an attempt to grapple with the fecund ruins of a delegitimized Eurocentric humanism. More specifically, postcolonial theory pushed further these poststructuralist tenets in order to consolidate a critique of cultural-nationalism and statist ideological formations.
If postcolonial theory emerged within the ferment of theory in the late twentieth century, the recent turn to paradigms of global literary study — what I will henceforth call literary globalism — is one consequence of theory's exertions. At this point, my story gets more interesting, for the turn to literary globalism is often implicitly posed as evidence of the obsolescence of postcolonial theory. On this view, literary globalism constitutes a step beyond the embattled paradigm of postcoloniality. In effect, confronted with real-world developments that appear to make twentieth-century anticolonial politics obsolete, literary globalism becomes a way of sublating postcolonial studies. I endorse the intellectual possibilities of literary globalism but argue that the rubric of postcoloniality still has good work to do. Consider this illustration of the way postcoloniality gets set up in antithetical relationship to literary globalism: during a campus visit by a graduate student finalist for a position, one interviewer informs the candidate that Kazuo Ishiguro is not a "postcolonial" writer. Presumably, Ishiguro is a "British," "cosmopolitan" writer, and to be these things is to escape the postcolonial label. In this way, the interviewer is saying that postcoloniality is a being, not a doing-in-the-world, still less a writing-in-the-world. This simplistic opposition takes us back to the old false binary, whereby particularity is posited as antithetical to universality. Students of African and Caribbean literatures will be familiar with this uninteresting line of thought. Once upon a time, critics quarreled over whether Christopher Okigbo is an African writer or V. S. Naipaul a Caribbean writer — especially because both men insisted they didn't see themselves as African or Caribbean writers, respectively. It should by now be enough to put the false opposition to rest by saying that postcolonial literature is a site of expression where postcoloniality exerts its force field, not an aestheticized monument to non-Western being. Located within a global political and intellectual conjuncture, postcoloniality is not an identity but a category of social existence and knowledge production. Properly grounded, postcoloniality is a problematic in the good Althusserian sense. It is not a political position to be construed as logically coextensive with the problematic that occasioned it. Despite the polemical arguments of the 1990s — between Marxists and poststructuralists, cultural-nationalists and postnationalists, or realists and postrealists — postcoloniality in the sense I am suggesting is not a subjective moral affair. It is rather the name of a set of historical entanglements and epistemic quandaries. Postcoloniality indexes a shared global context, necessarily local and inherently international, constituted by what Edward Said famously called "overlapping territories, intertwined histories." Understood this way, postcoloniality is not just a "method" of close reading, still less a moment in the old-fashioned literary history that begins with European desire flowing outward.
Here, then, is the moral of the story I've been sketching. The injunction to move beyond the postcolonial rubric in order to reach the global is a distraction. The best it does is to smuggle in a discredited version of universalism through the backdoor: in this case, the postcolonial is the particular that globalism claims to sublate in order to ascend to a spurious universalism. Hoary and dehydrated, this discredited approach to literature and culture might yet survive the sustained poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of the 1980s and 1990s. Wherever agency is approached in abstraction from particular articulatory moments wherein all meaning — another word for agency — necessarily takes shape, the old Eurocentric universalism is getting ready to roll. I come at these issues from the perspective of postcolonial African literary studies. I start with a truism that repays constant reiteration: namely, the usefulness of a theory does not lie in what its defenders or critics say about it but how it equips us to analyze cultural problems in innovative ways, or use literature to challenge theory itself. I've been suggesting that the problematic of postcoloniality cannot be dissolved into the backwash of literary globalism and world literature — at least not without significant losses. A productive approach is to begin by contextualizing both currents in order to retrieve the intentionality of their interrelated emergence. Where postcolonial studies serve in literature departments to expose the elisions of Eurocentric literary criticism, globalism seeks to overcome the covert cultural nationalism at the heart of traditional literary studies. What postcolonial theory shares with globalism is thus the attempt to overcome narrow cultural nationalisms disguised as liberal aesthetic attentiveness. Approached in this way, the confluence of postcolonial studies and literary globalism might allow us to rethink the relationship between the local and the global, the national and the transnational.
This book positions Africa, construed as a geopolitical and subjective signifier, within ongoing discussions about both postcoloniality and literary globalism. I am broadly interested in the discourses that have worlded the signifier Africa, but my primary object of analysis is what Africans, or figures who identify themselves as such, have had to say about the continent's past and future. It is easy to show that the best of African literature has always been internationalist in outlook. The central preoccupation of African literature has been to insert Africa in the global march toward the promise of progress and justice in modernity. And yet, the literature often serves cultural nationalism by laying claim to the glorious duty of combating stereotypes about the continent. In this unremarked imbrication of the national and the global lies a key question: how might the struggle in the realm of culture and representation avoid becoming detached from the political contradictions being played out in the continent's affairs? It is stating the obvious to observe that the bloodshed and economic distress in contemporary Africa expose the failures of the continent's nation builders. For my purposes, the challenge to be faced is that the continent's problems compel a reconsideration of the protocols of literary globalism and African humanities scholarship. My concern in this book is to pursue such reconsideration by exploring points of intersection and divergences between different kinds of writing about Africa by figures of African descent. This chapter presents a first step in that direction by exploring fault lines and continuities in mainstream theory, from its rise to influence in the 1970s to its afterlives in our post-9/11 world. My aim is to think about literary globalism against a background of two historical and discursive energies: namely, mid-twentieth-century black internationalism and postindependence African literature.
The argument of this chapter unfolds in three steps. In the first section, I conduct a summary stocktaking of Anglo-American literary and cultural criticism over the last few decades. I do so by examining the intersection of postcolonial studies and poststructuralist theory as it took shape in the 1980s. I then turn to current conversations about literary globalism and world literature: at that point, I suggest that taking seriously the discursive consequences of transatlantic slavery and black diasporic thought are crucial to any genuine understanding of Africa's epistemic particularity on the global stage. I conclude by drawing out how the chapter's stocktaking can serve to enrich our approach to literary globalism and postcolonial studies at the present time. The task of explicating African literature, I argue, should specifically involve a pedagogical investment, such that the reading and teaching of literature is informed by utopic projection of subjectivities in the making. As we shall see, I call these subjects of the future our "readers on the ground."
Some Consequences of Theory
This section's subtitle evokes the collection of essays edited by Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson titled Consequences of Theory and published in 1991. In evoking this exemplar of the theoretical conversations of the 1980s, I want to suggest that many things have changed, even as other things remain the same three decades later. One thing that remains unchanged is the signifier "Africa" within the vicissitudes of theory. In their Introduction to Theory after "Theory," coeditors Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (2011) make the valid judgment that a "range of discourses and practices, initiatives and projects … may be seen to descend from the 'Theory' of the 1970s." They conclude that in all these theoretical developments and new fields is a "lively sense of a continuing debate about fundamental issues such as life, representation, contingency, subjectivity, and freedom and at the same time a vigorous conversation about wholly practical questions relating to political change, living conditions, institutional practices and so on" (14). I argue that one of the tasks of the new theoretical developments should be to explore the resubjectification of colonialism's racial others — their performances of autonomous agency as raced and sexed subjects in real time. In the case of African letters, this resubjectification sought to redress the denigration of the African under the sign of the subhuman. It is well known that this racist objectification also had violent dimensions and was neither confined to the domain of representation nor simply epistemic. In the spirit of Elliott and Attridge's closing rally, "'Theory' is dead; long live theory" (14), I want to revisit some instructive scenarios that theory has thrown up in the last couple of decades. One comes from the poststructuralist debates of the 1970s and 1980s, the other from our contemporary moment of globalism.
I begin where theory as we now know it began, as sign and tension, to adapt a formulation by V. Y. Mudimbe from a different context. In an early essay from 1967 titled "Criticism and Crisis," Paul de Man reflects on the recurrent tendency in Western letters to resort to the rhetoric of crisis. De Man's essay takes up the notion of crisis as an anxiety that seems to haunt literary criticism as a matter of routine. His examples speak primarily to the issue of formal experimentation and the panic this seems ritually to generate, but his argument carries larger epistemological and political implications. That the revelation of his wartime journalism earlier in his career generated a crisis of its own, one that engulfed literary studies, contains a sobering irony, of course. But my interest in this essay comes from, first, his reflections on the challenge of knowledge production and, second, his privileging of literary knowledge as such. Reading Husserl's "The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy," de Man notices the contradiction in Husserl's invocation of a civilizational other. He finds Husserl's gesture particularly intriguing in a text that purports to reflect on philosophical demystification: "Husserl speaks repeatedly of non-European cultures as primitive, prescientific and pre-philosophical, myth- dominated and congenitally incapable of the disinterested distance without which there can be no philosophical meditation. This, although by his own definition philosophy, as an unrestricted reflection upon the self, necessarily tends toward a universality that finds its concrete, geographical correlative in the formation of supratribal, supernational communities such as, for instance, Europe. Why this geographical expansion should have chosen to stop, once and forever, at the Atlantic Ocean and at the Caucasus, Husserl does not say" (15). De Man is interested in how a notion of crisis figures in the rhetoric of Husserl at a time of the broader political crisis that Nazism signals. For him, Husserl's thinking about crisis performs a truth that the thinker is himself unaware of within the logic of his performance. For the frame of the civilized as opposed to the primitive that governs Husserl's text is precisely at the root of the epochal crisis driving Husserl's sincere critical attention.
Unlike Husserl, it is the blindness of ethnocentrism that structuralism sought to overcome. De Man reads Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism as nothing less than a dethronement of the old, transcendent subject of positivistic science. The problem is that Lévi-Strauss can only do so by installing "reason." This new apparatus of cognition is a "virtual focus" (19) that shores up the credibility of knowledge. In this way, structuralism commits Lévi-Strauss to the rigorous felicity of science, as opposed to the void of poetry. His virtual focus is fictional to the extent that the stability of cognition assumed in it is a fantasy. In de Man's words, "The 'virtual focus' is, strictly speaking, a nothing, but its nothingness concerns us very little, since a mere act of reason suffices to give it a mode of being that leaves the rational order unchallenged. The same is not true of the imaginary source of fiction" (19). Much to the contrary, for de Man, literary discourse does not seek to restore the rational order that the notion of "virtual focus" serves to reconstruct. The fiction that literature constructs reveals itself as a construction, one that harbors nothing beyond its own interiority. In the world made available in fiction, "the self has experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far from filling the void, asserts itself as pure nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability" (19). Earlier in his discussion of Rousseau, de Man writes: "The self-reflecting mirror-effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence on the constitutive activity of this sign, characterizes the work of literature in its essence. It is always against the explicit assertion of the writer that readers degrade the fiction by confusing it with a reality from which it has forever taken leave" (17). This characteristic de Manian formulation invited polemical reactions, and got a good dose of them. Put simply, the most common critique that was leveled against deconstruction is that it cannot make possible a critical accounting of the relative gains of various ways of construing and representing reality and the mind's endeavor to grasp that reality in literature. This problematic enters into discussions of postcolonial literature through the debates between Marxists such as Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, and Epifanio San Juan on the one hand and poststructuralists such as Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha on the other hand. What interests me is the question of crisis that supplies de Man with the ground of his discussion. The debates around theory, or about poststructuralist postcolonial studies, were often framed in terms of crisis: for example, the crisis of the humanities, the crisis that political nihilism portends, and so forth. Current literary and cultural criticism has not moved beyond such metaphorics of crisis as characterized the theory debates of the late twentieth century. As indicated earlier, the claim that postcolonial studies has been rendered obsolete by new problems and crises is itself evidence that we are still within the historical space of postcoloniality. Whether it is attributed to the corporatization of the university, the loss of prestige of the liberal arts in favor of quantifiably useful knowledge, or even the so-called lowering of standards by political correctness, the idea that humanistic studies are in crisis is an old complaint. I suggest that the complaint tells us more about unresolved problems within literary studies than about the tyranny of university administrations and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. A productive response to the anxiety is to grasp it as sign of ongoing change within literary studies and on the social terrain. Understood this way, what comes across as "crisis" — in politics as much as in the humanities — may also be approached proactively as challenge and possibility.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "African Literature And Social Change"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Missionary Moments
1. Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora
2. Mission Tide: Bishop S. A. Crowther and the "Black Whitemen"
3. Decolonization Time: Abrahams, James, Wright
4. Globalization Time: Achebe, Soyinka, and Beyond
Epilogue: Gaps
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible."
Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960.
Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960.
This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.
This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.