African Literature and Us Empire: Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing

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Postcolonialism has long been associated with post-nationalism. Yet, the persistence of nation-oriented literatures from within the African postcolony and its diasporas registers how dreams of national becoming endure. In this fascinating new study, Hallemeier brings together African literary studies, affect studies and US empire studies, to challenge chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Nigerian and South African writings in African Literature and US Empire, while often attuned to the trans- and extra- national, repeatedly scrutinise why visions of national exceptionalism, signified by a 'pan-African' Nigeria and 'new' South Africa, remain stubbornly affecting, despite decades of disillusionment with national governments beholden to a neocolonial global order. In these fictions, optimistic forms of nationalism cannot be reduced to easily critiqued state-sanctioned discourses of renewal and development. They are also circulated through experiences of embodied need, quotidian aspiration and transnational, pan-African relationship.

Reviews

African Literature and US Empire is a study of imbricated exceptionalisms with implications for our understanding not only of anglophone writing from two of Africa's most powerful states, but also of the globalization of the American dream and the tenacity of the national as category of ongoing affective investment. Hallemeier is a careful reader and astute theorist able to harness the energies of affect studies to a powerful materialist critique of the reproduction of aspirations and inequities transported from the US to African contexts; in so doing, her study offers new ways of understanding the very categories 'postcolonial', 'post-independence', and 'neo-colonial'.--Andrew van der Vlies, University of Adelaide

Author Bio

Katherine Hallemeier is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Geneva. She is the author of J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (2013). Her research on contemporary anglophone African fiction has appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and ariel.