Bernth Lindfors and Dennis Brutus in association: African literary studies, anti-apartheid politics, and the paradox of competing principles

Abstract

This essay threads together Bernth Lindfors’ contributions to African literary studies, Dennis Brutus’s career as an activist poet, and the political positions of the African Literature Association on academic and cultural boycott. The analysis of this history brings into focus the way that the institutions of African literary studies in the US from their early formation in the 1970s until the present have paradoxically reproduced the often limiting norms of literary scholarship and at the same time challenged the convention of political neutrality that is a feature of scholarly associations. Metropolitan African studies in general, like other area studies fields, have been troubled by the paradox of competing principles: on the one hand, the principle of political neutrality and non-interference; and on the other hand, the principle of social responsibility, derived in large part from the influential conceptualization of engagement in the 1960s. Lindfors, Brutus, and the other founding members of the African Literature Association gave expression to this paradox to one degree or another, but it was notably on the question of the cultural boycott of South Africa that the competing principles became the most intensely polarizing.