This chapter asserts that J. M. Coetzee’s ostensibly surprising turn to questions of religion in “The Jesus Novels” should have been anticipated from his trajectory of concerns since the novels of the late 1990s. Through a genetic reading of Disgrace that extensively uses Coetzee’s notebooks and drafts for the novel, I show how this work posits the reality of souls, human and nonhuman, and imagines how that reality can reorient the self away from abusive uses of others and toward practices of care. This reading of Disgrace traces how Coetzee dismantles previous forms of Western perception through an anti-epiphany, opening the way for belief in souls to produce a better form of life and seeing others. The chapter closes by considering how the Jesus novels further develop the life of spiritual contemplation that Coetzee’s late style explores.

The ‘revolution’ that transformed the Department of English at the University of Nairobi was sparked by a short paper by three African staff members, among them Ngugi wa Thiong’o. They argued for its replacement by a Department of Literature centring works by Africans in the first year and proceeding in the next two years through concentric circles of world literature; ‘African literature’, crucially, was construed to include oral tradition. When Ngugi published this document – which was already locally famous – it took on global cultural significance. Makerere was also reconsidering its colonial-era literature syllabus, and the new University of Dar es Salaam was developing a syllabus aligned with the country’s socialist values. All three countries were nation-building in a highly politicised environment that problematised the free expression of ideas advocated by the literature revolutionaries. At Nairobi, a path towards the revolution had been opened by the expatriate department head, and the revolution itself was shepherded by his expatriate successor. Although success seemed inevitable when Ngugi became department chair in 1973, President Jomo Kenyatta and his allies felt threatened by the spread of ideas, and the government’s suppression ultimately drove him into lifelong exile. His call for ‘decolonising’ the African mind still rings out, not yet achieved.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o encountered Lamming and Brathwaite in his twenties and recognised in them a model for his development as an African writer. Their influence was formative. Lamming’s appeal to the black writer to get to know his world intimately first before moving outward, and Brathwaite’s vision of the University of the West Indies as a site of self-knowledge, powered Ngugi’s move to place African literature at the centre of literary studies at the University of Nairobi. Inspired by their commitment to create an aesthetic reconnecting West Indian literature to its spiritual heartland, Ngugi set himself the radical task of spearheading an African literature written in African languages. Fanon’s ideas about the psychology of colonialism and his call for liberation through political and cultural mobilisation first came to Ngugi through Lamming and, in some instances, through Brathwaite. Like Lamming, Ngugi became a harsh critic of cultural imperialism and middle-class obstructors of decolonisation. Impressed by Lamming’s portrayal of the centrality of people in history, Ngugi magnified the community’s prominence in his works. Like Brathwaite, who strove to reverse the erasure of African history and tradition in the Caribbean, Ngugi reconnected the past to the present as a basis for the future, thus ‘re-membering’ Africa. Lamming and Brathwaite stimulated the liberatory thrust of Ngugi’s work.

This chapter discusses market literature from its emergence in the late 1940s in southern Nigeria to its contemporary versions, with a focus on Onitsha market literature, Tanzanian pamphlets, and Ghanaian market fiction. The essay shows that the concept of the “market” is essential to the genre: it is a commercial print literature made for quick trade among the common person on the street seeking self-growth and a lively literature pushing at the boundaries of acceptability, prompting change and promising sensation and transformation. The cases of Tanzania and Ghana urge a reconsideration of the genre’s defining features, particularly in terms of the tensions between commercialization and artistry, and didacticism and poetics. We see how an uncensored industry trained on novelty may by turns elicit tabloidesque stories and expose social abuses. In its wide variability, the genre registers the turbulent process of putting norms of many kinds under social pressure. Ghana market literature’s spectacular rise and fall mirrors that of Onitsha market literature to make plain how sociopolitical optimism encourages aesthetic adventuring while economic downturns reduce publishers’ and readers’ options to survivalist works.

Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s fiction blends Yoruba cosmology and modernist aesthetics. This blend renders the critical tendency to juxtapose the Indigenous and the modern, via the spiritual and the material, impossible. Instead, Tutuola’s fiction is an Indigenous response to mid-century West African modernisation and industrialisation under global capitalism. Drawing on Yoruba cosmology, this response offers an immanent critique of colonial modernity’s capitalist world-system by refusing to separate the spiritual and the material, thereby adapting a ‘folk’ logic that capitalism allegedly replaced. This survival of Indigenous cosmology into modernity demonstrates an analogous relationship between Tutuola’s animist realism and the gothic, a form that likewise offers an immanent critique of global capitalism by way of adapting folk logics. This analogous relationship leads this chapter to comparatively read Tutuola’s vision of the uncanny alongside the Freudian uncanny, highlighting the need for world-gothic criticism to situate the gothic alongside non-Western forms that render a shared modernity uncanny.

This chapter discusses a multiplicity of Arthurs, all mirroring the complexity of contemporary Africa and the Middle East. Arthur is a familiar presence here in advertisements, video games, children’s books and popular films, but he is rarely found elsewhere. Interestingly, both Chaka and Saladin are sometimes positioned as local counters to Arthur, but later Arthurian references are more likely to be comic or satirical, except for allusions to the Grail legend. References to the latter are characteristic of Nashid Uruk, for instance, and it has been argued that Doris Lessing’s work also reveals a sustained pattern of Grail imagery. Other representations of Arthur are almost entirely negative, linking him to autocratic rule, class elitism, gender imbalance and armed violence; however, awareness of Sir Moriaen, the Moorish knight, seems to be resurging and this may at last allow the tales to move out of the oppressive shadow cast by European imperialism.

Utilizing Safia Elhillo’s poetry as a case study, this chapter explores the role of literary institutions in redefining African poetry. Elhillo, a Sudanese-American poet, challenges traditional geographic and cultural boundaries within the African literary canon through her collection The January Children. Her recognition by prestigious literary prizes, notably the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, exemplifies the expanding scope of what constitutes African poetry. This analysis highlights how institutions, by honoring diasporic poets, have historically configured the African literary tradition to be inclusive of diasporic and transnational experiences. The chapter argues that the essence of this inclusion of diasporic poetry lies in an African imagination that intertwines experiences from varied locales with the specifics of African realities as they migrate across national and continental borders. By examining these dynamics, the chapter underscores a significant shift in the literary canon, showcasing the evolving, multifaceted nature of African literature in a global context.

In order to make sense of literary texts, writers and readers require some common understanding of what happened and what matters in history, of what has already been written, and of where people and things are located in relation to other people and things. The academic study of African literature, too, relies on common notions of Africa, its past and its location in the world. We are calling these shared understandings, integral to imagining a work in the first place and necessary for it to be understood by those who receive it, the archive of African literature. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves in a tradition and center themselves in the world. Mental maps define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions to which producers of texts must respond: where stories are set, who writers write for, how texts have meaning. Writers need to imagine themselves contributing to a body of literature; readers need to understand the field in which texts are produced.

This chapter investigates the intricate intertextual discourse between African writers and their European counterparts, exploring their responses to the often distorted representations of Africa by European authors. From historical figures such as Luís de Camões and Joyce Cary to modern writers like Albert Camus and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, these encounters with Africa have had a significant impact on global literature. African writers, influenced by their European predecessors, navigate a nuanced relationship marked by both admiration and critique. They draw from similar literary traditions and styles while simultaneously challenging and subverting racist stereotypes. Through their narratives, they carve out a unique space, amplifying silenced voices and reclaiming agency over their own stories and identities. As agents of change, they reveal obscured truths and guide readers through the complexities of colonial and postcolonial histories. Ultimately, the African novelists discussed in this chapter demonstrate that just as imperialism is rooted in European history, modernism is an integral aspect of Africa’s narrative landscape, reshaping perceptions and reclaiming narratives for future generations.

The geologic as an archive foments the naturalization of human conflict in African literature. African literature makes certain relations a natural property of the geological character of the land. It makes it impossible to think of social and political alterations without reflecting violent eruptions. Geological structures not only are presented as arenas for human activities but naturalize human perception and anti-colonial conflict mirrored through landscapes, which in turn become caches of resilient memories, rallying points for the imagination of new futures and struggles, and prompts and symbols of new archives. In the texts selected for study, geological metaphors allow a writer such as Geoffrey Ndhlala to locate individuals and societies in terms of larger patterns, such as strangers and hosts, and to relativize them. A contrast is also established between sedentary valley people, such as in The River Between, whose horizons are dangerously restricted, and walkers and travelers, such as in Cry, the Beloved Country and Long Walk to Freedom, who achieve a larger picture. These contrasts and comparisons are not meant to be exhaustive but are illustrative of how the geologic is deployed as shared politics and archives.

Scholars such as Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui, and V. Y. Mudimbe have pointed out that the idea of Africa was designed to legitimize Western imperialism. This raises the question as to whether or not this idea can metamorphose into a liberating concept. Nevertheless, between the 1950s and 1980s, numerous creative writers almost invariably wrote poems, plays, and novels that focused on the identities of their various peoples, while taking the African identity as a given in their formal academic ruminations contained in their essays. Consequently, this chapter explores the extent to which the portrayals of the cultural identities of the peoples of Africa in numerous literary works by creative writers from the continent, and the African identity taken for granted in the bulk of the theoretical works by the same authors, point to a discrepancy in their presentations of the nature of postcolonial reconstruction. The thesis of the chapter is that foregrounding the names of the continent’s various peoples in scholarship would acknowledge their rich and highly diverse cultures, thereby significantly mitigating baseless continent-wide generalizations. We can then still talk of “African literature,” “African philosophy,” and “African history,” among others, but in a highly circumscribed manner.

This chapter explores the transformations of Christianity in African novels. While it is clear from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that Africans believed in a supreme God before the intervention of missionaries, most postcolonial novels describe the role played by the advent of the “new” God in the consolidation of colonialism. The collusion between church, capitalism, and colonial administration is well illustrated by several authors from different linguistic backgrounds. However, with the rise of theologies of liberation, novelists like V. Y. Mudimbe and Pius Ngandu Nkashama have revisited the role and function of the church in postcolonial settings. They put God’s name to task in order to challenge the inconsistencies and disillusionments born out of independence. With the proliferation of Pentecostal churches, God has remained a key plot driver in postcolonial narratives. From domination to liberation, the African religious and spiritual landscape has shifted significantly over the decades. This chapter uses postcolonial scholarship to investigate the ways in which the name of God has shaped narratives in various geographies of the African continent. From colonial priests to liberation leaders, the face of missionaries is totally transformed in African novels.

This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, speeches, music, and the ideas these texts embody in creating an alternative archive to that established by European thinkers. By focusing on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Drum Generation, political icons like Nkrumah, Garvey, Fanon, and Mandela, with odd pairings like Mugabe and Marley and a sampling of West African plays, I trace how the African diaspora shifted understandings of an imagined community on the African continent, while African thinkers changed how its diaspora understood the continent itself in terms of those imaginings. I am arguing for a vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary production as a repository of cultural strategies with material effects, which centralize how Pan-Africanisms imagine modernity.

While influential accounts grasp African realism as the child of decolonisation in West Africa, we trace its longue durée from formative events and institutions such as colonial and Christian publishing networks in Benin, Cape Verde, and South Africa; through the development of the idea of the African realist novel by intellectuals such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong at African universities and literary conferences, such as the 1962 Makerere Conference and 1963 Fourah Bay conference; to contemporary permutations such as the historical novel. If the purpose of the African realist novel is to give shape to regional history, we find the irreal aesthetics of Bessie Head’s Maru (1971) and Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard no more or less “real” than the ideal-typical realism of Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy (1956–1957). We conclude that “realism” and its various antinomies (modernism, naturalism, irrealism, etc.) must ultimately be “reconstellate[d]” in terms of “each text’s relation to history itself” (Nicholas Brown 2–3).

In this chapter, I explore the intersection of spatiality and postcolonial literary writing through a focus on African literatures, broadly speaking, and the practices of worlding therein. Both as a market category and as a subset of what is variously termed ’world literature’ or ’postcolonial literature’, African literary writing offers a rich case study of the ways in which literature functions not merely as a passive repository of space or site of spatial representation, but as a driver of the constitution and performance of space itself. In this manner, the literary functions not as discrete or autonomous but through its entanglements with broader material, social, and ideological circuits. To do so, this chapter begins with an overview of postcolonial spatiality before moving to questions of aesthetics, form, publicness, and circulation to consider the diverse and sometimes divergent ways in which the performance of spatiality in African literary writing operates across uneven and asymmetrically loaded networks of production and distribution. The chapter ultimately argues that differential performances of spatiality in various bodies of African writing demonstrate the ways in which practices of worlding remain mediated by the material, structural, and systemic constitution of literature.