Postcolonial studies has always been concerned with the production and regulation of space. As Madhu Krishnan notes in Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel, however, space has often been conceived in literary theory as “simply a presence” (2), an inert container against which history takes place. What would it mean if we instead grasp literature as actively participating in the production of space? How can this revised sense of space help us revisit some of the key texts and themes in the literary history of West Africa? By bringing together key theorists of space such as Edward Soja and Henri Lefevre with a range of authors from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa, Krishnan demonstrates how space, properly understood, can help scholars reframe our understanding of not only some of the key texts in African literary history, but the worldliness of African literature as well.

Krishnan’s approach to space is defined by a reevaluation of how literature relates to space and its place in the history of colonialism in Africa. As she explains, “Far from functioning as a static representation … space itself may be conceived of as an event, ever-shifting and never under the closure of completion” (8)—an event, moreover, that plays an active part in determining how African societies have been represented in the West. As she points out, “With the African continent more broadly comes a particularly pernicious example of the tendency … to turn space into time” (9). Thinking space and time together—how novels, in her terms, both reflect and participate in the “worlding” (2) of African literatures—thus enables her to embark upon a “rethinking of Africa through its spatial formations, recentring their salience with a view to erasing the temporal transformations that have rendered the continent as a spatial void” (10).

By positing literature as participating actively in the making of space, Krishnan aims to show how readers have long misconstrued aspects of West African literary history and how attention to space and spatialization asks us to reimagine the relationship between “Africa” and the “world.” Throughout the book’s four chapters, she therefore rereads a wide range of seminal texts, including Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure Ambiguë, Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, and Teju Cole’s Open City, to show how attention to the dynamic nature of space can shed new light on the ways these texts narrate the experience of modernity on the continent. In the first chapter, for instance, Krishan shows how the narrator’s search for his palm wine tapper in The Palm-Wine Drinkard upends both colonial orderings of space and the stereotypes about primitivism that have long defined the reception of Tutuola’s work. In chapter three, Krishnan reads Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre in the context of debates over dynamics of post-independence Senegal in order to show how its protagonist’s seemingly isolated existence is in fact structured by debates about the place of women in modernity that occur across multiple spatial scales.

Writing Spatiality in West Africa is certainly not without its missteps. Some readers unacquainted with spatial perspectives in literary studies may be frustrated by Krishnan’s tendency to use terms like “space,” “spatiality,” “spatialization” and “spatial ecologies” without clear definition. Those invested in comparative work in African and postcolonial literary studies may also find the results of Krishnan’s comparative focus underwhelming. For any critic who has been frustrated by the persistence of old stereotypes about African literatures, however, Krishnan offers an important recasting of the spatial relations organizing discourse around the continent. As she explains, her effort is not about constituting “an alternative to modernity or an alternative modernity,” but instead “to highlight the ways in which these texts, through their worlding of space and its very worldedness as an artefact co-constituted therein, make a series of claims to a different mode of world-creation and being-in-the-world” (193). At a time when academic and popular interest in Africa and its societies grow ever stronger, this reframing of the worldliness of African literatures is no doubt the book’s most salient achievement, one on which Africa scholars can draw for many years to come.