I begin these reflections on genre in African cultural studies by taking a few steps back from a commonsense understanding of genre and the distinctions made between literary fiction and genre fiction. In the spirit of that initial gesture, I do not take for granted that there are genres strewn across the landscape of African creativity whose contours and features are simply awaiting discovery by sundry scholars. But that is not to say that I come to the subject without an agenda. To the contrary, I approach the discussion from a vantage point informed by caveats gleaned from particular strands of the scholarship in genre studies.

One might think of genre as an object of study located on several distinct, but intersecting axes of a graph. Two of these axes appear particularly prominent. In the first place and for some scholars, genres correspond to types of work identifiable by their formal features. When such scholars invest in isolating and delineating a genre’s specific features, they are engaged in what Jason Mittel calls a “definitional” approach to matters arising from a critical examination of genre.Footnote ¹ The prehistory of the definitional approach can be traced back to Aristotle’s Poetics. Although identification of any genre is hardly possible without recourse to such definitions, the problem, says Mittel, is that this mode of analysis for all its insights does not always account for how the genre in question functions within the broader culture. I share these concerns. On an intersecting axis, a related but alternative approach to the same subject might start with a consideration of the taxonomies occasioned when the features that characterize a given genre are itemized and organized. In response to the skepticism expressed about such taxonomies, and the very notion of genre itself by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Tzvetan Todorov among others, discussions in genre studies are now more likely than not to include disclaimers. Wai Chee Dimock observes, for example, that “membership of any genre is an open rather than a closed set, because there is always another instance, another empirical bit of evidence to be added.”Footnote ² John Frow adopts a similar perspective when he writes that “Genres . . . are neither self-identical nor self-contained.”Footnote ³ As with Mittel, I likewise concur with Dimock and Frow. Together, these caveats represent the starting point for my reflections on how to work with genre in African cultural studies.

Rick Altman reminds us that “Genres are not inert categories shared by all . . . , but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular purposes in specific locations.”Footnote ⁴ In effect, what is at stake in the notion of genre is the very process of grouping creative works together that is undertaken by individuals or institutions for the purpose of facilitating interpretation and circulation through reading, listening, or viewing. I approach individual genres, then, as emerging from a flexible grouping of works, often though not always constructed around a recognizable form or recognizable feature. The individual genre denotes a type of work, but also the outcome of categorization or classification of creative works within diverse discourses related to diverse publics. These groupings play an especially important role for the discursive networks that emerge in relation to the circulation of works along particular routes. It should come as no surprise that the same creative work ends up under multiple and divergent classifications in its encounter with different publics. To the extent that an individual work receives a generic assignment, that acknowledgment cannot be divorced from one or more discursive networks and publics where this distinction happens to be salient.

I am less interested in the conventions informing the composition of any one genre than in the process by which these conventions emerge, become calcified, and then soften again to give way to other conventions. This continuous process facilitates the appearance of new genres as well as the fading or hybridization of others. My response to the papers in this special issue stems from an interest in the constructed nature of the fluid classifications that form around recognized and recognizable types of creative work. I would like to pose a number of related questions with regard to these fluid categories or groupings of works: What kinds of groupings matter, where do they matter, why do they matter, and how do they matter? I also wish to advance a preliminary and provisional answer to these questions, namely: each constructed grouping matters for its ability to generate distinct circuits of transmission that allow for a specific type of encounter with the work, a type of response to the work, and the elaboration of a distinct history of travel and interpretation of the creative work.

If we think of genres as systems of classification that are salient for particular discursive networks and publics, then genres are present everywhere in discourses about African cultural production, and they index known quantities that do not necessarily take us back to Aristotle’s Poetics. At this juncture, though, I propose a critical distinction between systems of classification that owe their recognition to interventions by cultural intermediaries of various kinds and those systems of classification that operate for the most part without input from cultural intermediaries. For my purposes here and following Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews, I understand cultural intermediaries to be individuals and institutions, who “construct value by framing how others—end consumers, as well as other market actors including other cultural intermediaries—engage with goods. . . .”Footnote ⁵ Maguire and Matthews also add that cultural intermediaries “are differentiated by their explicit claims to professional expertise in taste and value within specific cultural fields.”Footnote ⁶ As scholars of literature, cinema, and other creative works, we too undoubtedly work as cultural intermediaries alongside professional critics, award juries, and curators for artworks among others.

The activity that we and other cultural intermediaries undertake with respect to cultural goods is one of recognition, that is, facilitating an encounter between the creative work and a designated public. There can be no encounter between the public and a creative work in the absence of some instance of recognition. A work that is unrecognized is a work that might as well not exist. As Shu-Mei Shih puts it, “What precedes recognition, and is more devastating than the politics of recognition, is sheer negligence or feigned ignorance.”Footnote ⁷ For literature specifically, Shu-Mei Shih underscores the powers of global “technologies of recognition that selectively and often arbitrarily confer world membership on literatures, whether national, local, diasporic, or minority.”Footnote ⁸ Misrecognition is as much a danger as complete disregard when powerful institutions confer recognition on creative works by individuals from relatively disempowered communities. In these instances, the authors, filmmakers, and others may find themselves not only recognized, but also placed in what Shih calls a “prison of recognition” from which there is no escape.Footnote ⁹ Yet other works are able to circulate within minor or subaltern publics because the basis for their recognition is embedded within the work itself and does not depend on external modalities such as advertising or critical review. To this camp belong the attributes of popular genres functioning as embedded modalities enabling recognition even when, and if, influential cultural intermediaries disregard and dismiss the work.

African literature, African cinema, and African art, among others, are classifications of creative work that owe their existence to the activity of powerful “technologies of recognition” as Shih puts it, or cultural intermediaries. An acknowledgment that a creative work justifiably belongs under the rubric of “African literature” often occurs thanks to the intervention of cultural intermediaries connected to dominant discursive networks or affiliated with prestigious institutions. Every work of literature by a self-identified African author does not make the cut. In most instances, and in order to even qualify for consideration as African literature, the literary work by an African author needs to have been released by a publisher with affiliates active around the world, and especially in the global north. Similar processes and institutions are at work in determining what cluster of works deserves recognition under the rubric of African cinema. To quote Maguire and Matthews again, cultural intermediaries are involved in the determination “of what, and thereby who, is legitimate, desirable and worthy, and thus by definition what and who is not.”Footnote ¹⁰ With respect to literature, this classification matters for which books are grouped together in brick and mortar bookstores both within and outside Africa, which works are studied together, and read with reference to one another. In a 2015 interview, for example, the writer Aminatta Forna complained about the placement of her novel, The Hired Man, in the Africa section of a New York bookstore because the story was set in Croatia.Footnote ¹¹ A few weeks later, and perhaps in response to her complaint, the novel found a new home in another section of the same bookstore titled “European Literature.” To be clear, Forna’s goal in the interview was to denounce classifications of literature in general, not to renounce affiliation with Africa. The number of African authors who have expressed similar concerns about the classifications for their writing is considerable. Nonetheless, the classifications persist, in part because the will to sort and classify objects is a human trait, and in part because the market for books and other cultural goods depends on an artful deployment of classification.

To those who might object that I am conflating the capacious category of African literature with the canon of African literature, I would respond that a canon corresponds to a special type of genre, a restricted grouping of works assembled by highly credentialed cultural intermediaries whose influence often radiates well beyond a singular nation or territory. Other than the identity of the authors, the attributes that qualify a work for admission into this canon are not self-evident, but revealed over time in specialized discourses often generated by and for academic audiences. Within the ever-changing canon, there are additional subdivisions and groupings. This is where antagonism over genre thrives and what Peter Hitchcock calls counter-fitting is most likely to occur. In the realm of popular culture, by contrast, the tolerance level for hybrid, mutating, and misnamed genres has always been higher. In Hollywood, for example, and as noted by Rick Altman over and over again in his book Film/Genre, genre mixing and genre re-combinations were widespread. It makes commercial sense for a film that appears on the surface to be a Western to also borrow from the conventions of disaster movies and romantic comedies among other possibilities.

Be that as it may, within African literary studies, some of the debates over genre have been fierce. Some will recall that arguments regarding the existence of the epic in Africa raged from the 1970s to the 1990s with notable scholars defining and defending opposing positions. What was at stake in those heated arguments over the epic was an agreed upon history for the various branches of African literature. That polemic from the previous century provides useful illustration for Dimock’s assertion that systems of categorization affect how we recount literary history, how far back we are willing to go, and where we are willing to look for evidence to back our claims.Footnote ¹² In this instance like others, disagreements over specific classifications, or shall we say genres, had implications for the kind of knowledge that would be produced about African literature by scholars and how that knowledge would be presented. The outcome of that debate about the epic in Africa is to be measured in the publication of books with such titles as The Epic in Africa (1979), The Epic of Son-Jara (1992), and Epic Traditions of Africa (1999), among others.Footnote ¹³ John Frow quotes the cognitive scientist Walter Kintsch referring to the production of knowledge as a mapping of “associative networks.”Footnote ¹⁴ More so than a rediscovery of categories that had always been self-evident to all, these are likely instances of charting original associative networks for their potential contribution to our understanding of the larger and equally constructed category of African literature.

The positioning of African-authored genre fiction either within popular culture or even in relation to popular culture is a subject of concern in this special issue. Although he is careful to distinguish between developments in Anglophone and Francophone Africa in his comments on African popular culture, Pim Higginson highlights particular parallels between a presumably popular African genre fiction and African literary fiction. Both, he appears to say, are accessible mainly to readerships located outside Africa. He then adds a more controversial assertion, namely that the notion of a culture industry producing popular culture, at least, as defined by Stuart Hall, does not really apply to cultural productions in Francophone Africa.

With respect to the connections between genre narratives and popular culture in Africa, I would suggest that the adoption of generic conventions does not always signify an affiliation with popular culture. The components of a genre are above all recognizable to interested publics. They are not, however, consistently deployed with a view to matching the protocols of popular culture. I doubt, for example, that many viewers of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako think of it as an instance of African popular cinema, despite the fact that a few scenes in the movie enact the clothing, the poses, and the motions of a Western.Footnote ¹⁵ The Western has its origins in commercial cinema, but it has also been successfully adapted and overwritten for many other kinds of cinema as was noted by the contributors to the volume The Western in the Global South.Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, questions about popular culture are related but not necessarily intrinsic to any consideration of genre.

One of the more important attributes of genre, in my opinion, is an ability to generate a distinct circuit of transmission that is peculiar to the individual genre and allows for many types of encounter with the individual work. A novel by Nnedi Okorafor, for instance, circulates in relation to discursive networks dedicated to young adult fiction, speculative fiction, and African literature, among others. In fact, and arguably, attention to Okorafor’s works has a longer history in speculative fiction circles than it does in African literature circles. By virtue of possessing a recognizable generic classification as science fiction or crime fiction, among others, African and African diasporic genre fiction is often able to move among and beyond those publics committed to interacting with a corpus of works specifically designated as African literature. And while the discursive networks that cater to different genres and groupings of texts may overlap at certain points, they often function independently of each other, such that participants in one or more discursive networks are frequently unconcerned by the reception of the same work in other discursive networks. On many speculative fiction sites, for example, Okorafor’s works matter only as speculative fiction and rarely in addition as African literature.

Furthermore, and although some of the circulation pathways for creative works by Africans directly interface with or fully depend on global capital, there are circulation pathways, independent of global capital especially for creative works that exhibit easily recognizable generic features. Nollywood is one of many locally initiated cultural undertakings in contemporary Africa, and it is a genre-driven film industry, if ever there was one. Virtually all scholars of Nollywood are agreed on this point: Nollywood production owes its emergence to local business interests that funded and continue to fund film production.Footnote ¹⁷ As locally driven and locally financed initiatives, the video film enterprises of West Africa enact a reverse trajectory to the one laid out by Higginson for Francophone African crime fiction.

These locally financed cultural enterprises are often able to reach vast audiences dispersed across Africa and the world despite failing to receive a stamp of approval from credentialed cultural intermediaries, and even sometimes without the benefit of a substantial advertising budget. Nonetheless, the output of these cultural enterprises is legible and visible to other publics because the modalities for their recognition are embedded within the work itself. Indeed, and frequently, the most prized attribute in creative works emanating from these cultural enterprises is not their originality, but the degree to which they are recognizable as conforming to one genre or another. The essays by Dina Ligaga, Olubukola Gbadegesin, and Carmela Garritano in this issue all point to specific modalities of recognition that extend across media but were and are highly legible within distinct African publics where the professional judgments rendered by cultural intermediaries have minimal weight.

If we accept that each genre mobilizes a set of modalities of recognition, then we will also want to acknowledge that all genres are not created equal for scholars in different fields. For African cultural studies, the modalities associated with the genres of science fiction and crime fiction are more likely than others to be the subject of critical engagement by scholars. The close affinity between issues animating African literary fiction and African science and crime fiction undoubtedly accounts for higher levels of scholarly interest in the latter genres. In contrast, and despite wide appeal with diverse leisure publics across Africa, the scholarship trail is comparatively slender when it comes to romance, comedy, and the many varieties of horror with their equally varied figurations of the supernatural. At Nigeria’s box office in recent years, the highest grossing locally produced films often belong to the genres of comedy, romance, and romantic comedy.Footnote ¹⁸ The section of the catalog for the Ivorian publisher the Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes accounting for the highest number of individual titles is its romance series named Adoras, with a total of seventy-four titles at the time of writing.Footnote ¹⁹ Why these particular instances of genre narratives feature so prominently with leisure publics localized in Africa is one of many questions for which we do not yet have clear answers. Our field of work surely stands to benefit from commensurate attention to both the genres that matter to credentialed cultural intermediaries and their publics, as well as to the less visible assemblages of creative works that signify so powerfully for diverse leisure publics in Africa.