Owing to the conditions of its emergence, African literature aroused in scholars an admixture of aesthetic pleasure and critical anxiety. Inspired (and inspiring) anti–colonial struggles across the continent even as it was caught up in the contradictions of nationalism,Footnote ¹ this multilingual, multi-generic, literary corpus could not be neatly contained by its designation. Depending on how one understood “African,”Footnote ² one could spill some writing out of the term or stuff others into it. Fortunately, as Tejumola Olaniyan (2016) acknowledges, the anxieties that questions about the “provenance” of “African” literature aroused in literary scholars have now eased (387).Footnote ³

But another cause for unease, this one aroused by “theory,” persists. Broadly conceived as “discourse” that put foundational concepts of literary criticism such as language, text and authorship, criticism and meaning, consciousness and subjectivity in question, “theory” is perceived by its detractors as a “master discourse” by which unwary “postcolonial ‘cosmopolitan’ scholars” are enchanted (73).Footnote ⁴ Enraptured by it, they, like Mr. Kiaga, the African missionary in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (85–93),Footnote ⁵ seek affiliation with it. But affiliation with it is both impossible and costly. Because it addresses itself only to a community of organically bound individuals, it can neither hear their interventions nor attend to their concerns; and because to address it, they must do so in its idiom, they sever the bond of kinship that makes discourse with their community possible. According to this theory of discourse, discourse is “autonomous” and belongs to autonomous communities. This is why no discourse can accommodate the voice of cosmopolitan intellectuals or provide the platform on which they could engage the “master discourse” in genuine dialogue (54–56). In short, interlocution between Western and non-Western discourses is doomed to failure because, like East and West, the “twain” never “shall meet.” So intense is the anxiety that the enchantment of cosmopolitan intellectuals by “theory” arouses that, occasionally, it yields to deep dismay.

Olaniyan’s “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” is unlikely to allay such anxiety. On the contrary, it is more likely to deepen it, for two reasons. First, it sets the objections advanced against “theory” and “Western” critical apparatuses aside by successfully putting the premises that underpin the canonical axioms or “tests” of African literary scholarship in question. Second and, perhaps more significantly, the reformation of the “ideological test” (395–96), the resolution it proposes for how African literary criticism could productively engage the “ ‘post,’ ‘trans,’ and globalist/neo-universalist propositions” is likely to be perceived as a reversion to Western theory, “African Marxist criticism” being, according to its detractors, also alien. I say “revert” because, for almost two decades, African literary scholarship has distanced itself from Marxist criticism even as, as Olaniyan notes, movements within the field have built upon its hermeneutical insights (395, note 15). In other words, the fact that the “African” in the phrase above refers to black scholars (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Biodun Jeyifo, Omafume Onoge, and, we should add, Emmanuel Ngara and Chidi Amuta) may be understood as suggesting a return to, and reformation of, the critical methodology “invented” by these scholars. In turn, this could reassure those for whom the “corporeal test” remains important. It would not, however, satisfactorily address all of the objections that Marxist criticism, in its African variant, raised in the past, namely, that it is not “African.”

Concerns of this kind cannot be adequately addressed by a representation of African Marxist criticism that retains the idea that its “Africanness” should be tethered to the identity of a critic. Because African identity is as much an ideological choice as it is a designation that society confers upon one, to do so would be to allow the “corporeal test” which, quite rightly, Olaniyan had already discredited, to sneak back into African literary criticism through the back door. Against a reformation of the “ideological test” that fails to challenge directly the persistent appeals to authenticity and indigeneity, it must be pointed out unequivocally that, as avowedly Marxist criticism of African texts such as that undertaken by Nicholas Brown (2005)Footnote ⁶ clearly demonstrates, the grounds on which the merits of any critical paradigm are best assessed are not the critic’s identity. Rather, it is by how creatively and effectively its core analytical principles have been deployed in the analysis of the object of study, how sensitively it has taken up and dealt with deviations from or contradictions to either those principles or the premises on which they rest that the object of analysis brings to light, how willingly and with what insight it interrogates its theoretical framework, and, finally, how it engages alternative critical theories and methodologies. Reforming the “ideological test” must require that we engage all, rather than some, theories and axioms of criticism and analytical methods with circumspection. It is for this reason that, as a prelude to answering the question, just what might a reformed Marxist criticism of African literature look like in what he calls the “Post-Global Age,” I now turn my attention to the narrative of globalization on which that notion of the post-global rests.

Explaining why he affirms that “‘post,’ ‘trans,’ and globalist/neo-universalist propositions” are “definitionally viable for African literature,” Olaniyan remarks that it is because he wishes “to shift the debate” about their viability “into different and more constructive directions” (388). Clearly, the remarks I made earlier about his discussion of the canonical axioms or “tests” show that I believe that the direction in which he has moved the debates is, indeed, very constructive. I am, however, less certain about the narrative of globalization on which he bases his concept of the post-global. Rather than represent a historical supersession of the “global age,” he argues, the prefix in “post-global” invites us “to think simultaneously in broad strokes and fine-grained refinements about the present and the future” (389). Thinking thus, he defines the post-global as “a way of describing quantitative and qualitative changes that introduce elements of the new, the different, and perhaps the puzzling into the familiar experience of social life” (389). Perhaps because he also realizes that to grasp the concept of the “post-global” we need to understand what the temporal scheme to which its ‘post’ refers, however, he does not give up altogether on the need to situate it in a historical narrative. That narrative, which offers us what we might call globalization’s prehistory, runs from the post–World War II Three Worlds theory of Mao Tse-tung to the unitary paradigm of the global. On superseding it, the global ushered in an era in which the “certainty of the nation-state and territorial sovereignty” were assumed and not interrogated. Because it actually relied on the “solidity and certainty of structural and decidedly local containers of nation, state, and sovereignty to give it, the global, a meaningful, substantive, even if ironic content,” the task of questioning the certainty of the nation-state then fell to the post-global (Olaniyan 390).Footnote ⁷

Given this prehistory of the global, students of the global may be surprised to learn that the “African of the last thirty years or so” is possibly better placed than anyone else to grasp the “emptying out of the nation-state and territorial sovereignty” (Olaniyan 390). For many of them, this African’s story of globalization would hardly be different from theirs. Indeed, as the following statement indicates, such disabling of the nation-state and violation of its territorial integrity is the shared experience of postcolonial nations under late capitalism:

I do not quote this passage to suggest that, whatever it might be, the story that the “African of the last thirty years” might tell about globalization would be no different from stories that others like him in Asia and Latin America might tell. Obviously, given differences in the way in which national and local economies across the globe are inserted into multinational capitalism since World War II, and given the differences in the ways in which those economies have been affected by the technological innovations, market collapses, financial and other crises that have shaken global capitalism, the stories that people in those parts of the world tell about their experiences of globalization are bound to differ. Such stories would differ even within individual nations. I quote that passage, first, to show, that, if the “global” that superseded the “three worlds hypothesis” is that towards which globalization strives, then the “emptying out of the nation-state and territorial integrity” is, in itself, a product of globalization’s refusal of our contemporary certitudes about the “nation-state and territorial integrity”; and, second, to suggest that the ultimate ambition of globalization may, as scholars have suggested, lie elsewhere.

We can grasp what that “elsewhere” is by turning to descriptions of capitalism at the turn of the century. Public Power in the Age of Empire, the source of the passage, was published in 2004. But in 1991, more than a decade earlier, Fredric Jameson had described the same phenomenon as late capitalism.Footnote ⁹ So designated because the transformation of capitalism that it represents is “more permanent” (xxi) than anything that preceded it, late capitalism is “a moment in which not merely the older city but even the nation-state itself has ceased to play a central functional and formal role in a process that has in a new quantum leap of capital prodigiously expanded beyond them, leaving them behind as ruined and archaic remains of earlier stages in the development of this mode of production” (412; italics added). What is noteworthy about Jameson’s description of late capitalism then is not that it corresponds with descriptions of globalization. Rather, it is that what late capitalism seeks is to lift from capitalism the sense of impermanence that had attended antecedent phases. As the following observation indicates, globalization is driven by a similar ambition to confer upon capitalism the status of an ineluctable system: “Globalization involves a certain configuration of time—one that cannot imagine an ‘after.’ Modernity could have a postmodernity to follow it. But globalization? Post-globalization sounds like some dystopian coda to everything, not a new phase of human experience” (2).Footnote ¹⁰ If what late capitalism/globalization longs for is to render capitalism as ineluctable “as fate” (41), then this obliges African literary criticism to consider the possibility that, to the question, “Are ‘post,’ ‘trans,’ and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for African literature,” the answer could be a qualified interrogative rather than a simple affirmative: “Yes, but . . . ?” not “Yes.”

In both cases, Olaniyan’s simple affirmative holds for all of the reasons he provides. But the qualified interrogative phrases the reformation of the “ideological test” as a question that African literary criticism needs to pursue: What might an ideology of criticism that recognizes that cultural production in contemporary Africa is fundamentally shaped by the dynamics of globalized finance capitalism look like? Certainly, such criticism cannot overlook the possibility that far from merely taking history as its context—the “totality of its historical ambience” (84)Footnote ¹¹ —(African) literature is taking history as its object, and that in doing so it is putting globalization, understood as the “perpetual present” (Cazdyn and Szeman 226), under pressure. And it has not. Reading M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) “as a theoretical model,” for example, Peter J. Kalliney dramatizes how, by rewriting narratives of globalization that always begin with European expansion, the novel exposes their historical as well as anthropological “blind spots” (300–01).Footnote ¹² Where Kalliney takes his lead from Vassanji’s novel, others take theirs from alternative narratives of globalization that have emerged from historiographical research in “diverse languages and archives” (331).Footnote ¹³ What they all share is the insight that, contrary to orthodox historiography, all systems of political governance, economic production and consumption, and imperial expansion that we now consider unique to modernity neither emerged from, nor were fabricated in, modern western Europe. On the contrary, even key systems such as “finance capital and labor regimes; structures of core and periphery; imperial knowledge-building projects serving colonization and state-building; and cultural interpellation of conquered communities through art forms and media campaigns” (336)Footnote ¹⁴ that we now associate exclusively with modernity arose from, and were developed in, regions of the world now integrated into the complex fretwork of transnational capitalism as peripheral yet integral nodes.

In the case of Senegal, for example, we learn that to fully grasp the modern complex of attitudes—affirmation or ambivalence—that Senegalese poets and novelists (Leopold Sédar Senghor, Amadu Bamba, and Ousmane Sembene) evince toward vernacular literatures in Arabic (‘ajami) and Roman script, we must reach beyond our knowledge of French colonial policies and practices designed to contain ‘ajami to the reception accorded the Arabic script in the precolonial period (Lienau 423).Footnote ¹⁵ What these developments suggest is that, to reform the “ideological test,” postcolonial (African) literary criticism must revise its conception of the literary work. That such works are aesthetic forms is not in doubt, any more than the status of “theory as a sort of fictional or narrative enterprise” is (Kalliney 301). So what criticism must consider at this time is whether the reformation of ideology might not entail discarding a methodology that treats writers as “mindless geniuses” whose works serve as launch pads from which criticism propels itself into the ethereal (Ngũgĩ 13)Footnote ¹⁶ in favor of one that reads their works and theory against each other in order to generate from both insights about what their blind spots conceal. Obviously, this is a mode of reading that is readily applied to literary works. Whether it could also be applied to “cell phone novels” (Olaniyan 390) such as the bilingual (English and Xhosa) Kontax and, even more broadly, to technotexts—texts that are simultaneously verbal constructions and technologies of “literary production (generator, topology, distributivity, etc.)” (Vuković 27)Footnote ¹⁷ —is a question that African literary criticism cannot ignore.