“A Continent Learns to Tell its Story at Last”: Notes on the Caine Prize

Abstract

This article examines the role of the Caine Prize in the production, marketing, and reception of African anglophone writing, and argues that the prize participates in a system of postcolonial knowledge industry that both values and marginalizes postcolonial texts, as Graham Huggan, Sarah Brouillette and Timothy Brennan, among others, have analysed. Working with Huggan’s notion of the “postcolonial exotic” and Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of literary legitimation and artistic value, it considers the social, economic and cultural issues surrounding the prize, raising questions about the status of the prize as a legitimizing agent for African English-language fiction.