African Literatures as World Literature

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The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions What are that worlds limits, boundaries and possibilities How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

Reviews

This exciting volume provides an opportunity to recalibrate the study of world literature from the rich ensemble that is African letters. It is well researched, covers a broad range of themes and texts, and produces brilliant, innovative interpretations of literary texts and textual histories. Featuring the work of some of the leading scholars and practitioners of African literature, the volume is imaginatively progressive and conceptually ambitious. * Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English, Yale University, US, and author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018) *
With its strong argumentation and concentrated analysis of African literary writing invested in worldliness, critical significance and aesthetics, this work disrupts and challenges monolithic definitions of the world-literature canopy. Readers and scholars will find this edited anthology positioning and rebooting dynamic discussions on African literary discourses, theoretical interventions and world literary space. * Shilpa Daithota Bhat, Assistant Professor of English, National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar Campus, India *
African Literatures as World Literature brings together a series of essays that make visible the richness and complexity of world-making in literatures from across the African continent. Considering a plurality of literary forms and languages, as well as texts from a broad range of time periods, this invaluable collection challenges us to new understandings of both African literatures and world literature. Attuned to literary forms of world-making as well as the material networks in which literary practices are implicated, the essays open fresh and exciting perspectives on African literatures beyond conventionalized paradigms. Major achievements of this remarkable collection are its consideration of the variety of literary practices across different media as well as its rigorous engagement with literatures in non-Europhone African languages. Persistently ground-breaking, the volume presents a new archive and fresh, locally grounded categories for the study of world literature. The nuanced case studies and the bold conceptual interventions make this volume a must-read for anyone interested in world literature. * Birgit Neumann, Professor of English Literature and Anglophone Studies, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany *

Author Bio

Alexander Fyfe is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and African Studies at the University of Georgia. His articles have appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, among other venues. He has guest-edited special issues of African Identities and (with Rosemary Jolly) The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of three books: Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018); and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018).