Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 By Katherine Isobel Baxter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 by Katherine Isobel Baxter Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria, 1900–1966 BY KATHERINE ISOBEL BAXTER Edinburgh UP, 2019. viii + 205 pp. ISBN 9781474420839 cloth. The opening claim of Katherine Isobel Baxter’s Imagined States is that we can locate a crucial continuity between Nigeria as colony and as postcolony in “the state of exception” or “the suspension of the rule of law” (1). Even as Baxter evokes Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, her book challenges Agamben’s lack of interest both in colonial contexts and in the role of the imagination. By contrast with Agamben, Baxter aims “to show how British and Nigerian fiction writers … attended to and made visible the inventive force of the law [in Nigeria], not least in the suspension of the rule of law” (5). There’s a dialogic relation, then, between the law and literature of the book’s subtitle: on the one hand, Imagined States shows how narrative genres—“popular, middlebrow, and literary fiction,” along with memoir and newspaper journalism (6)—portray the law and related concerns from corruption to treason; on the other hand, the book demonstrates “the role of invention and imagination not only in the representation of the law but also in its operation and in its suspension” (11). At stake is a question that is both theoretically intriguing and politically urgent: “at what point does such invention become an exception to the law—an action with the force of law which nonetheless is no longer within the bounds of the law?” (24). Across seven chapters, beginning with the formation of the protectorates of Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria in 1900 and ending with the fall of the First Republic in 1966, Imagined States examines texts that include Edgar Wallace’s Sanders adventure series, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Onitsha market literature, journalism covering the trial of Obafemi Awolowo and other Action Group members in 1962–63, and especially early novels by Cyprian Ekwensi and Chinua Achebe. I found much to appreciate in Baxter’s literary analysis, from the explication in chapter 2 of District Commissioner fiction as a distinct subgenre of colonial adventure fiction, which casts the colonial officer as synonymous with civilization and thus with the law, through the virtuosic reading in chapter 7 of Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), in which varieties of violence repeatedly displace the law. Reading the book in a year when critical race theory had become a political football in the United States, I also found myself interested in how Baxter handled race in law (most often common law, though she mentions customary and Islamic law) and literature. While earlier chapters tend to treat the racism of [End Page 198] colonial governance and British fiction in the register of caustic irony, chapter 4, focusing on Achebe, more directly acknowledges “the racist representations of West Africa found not only in popular fiction, like Wallace’s, but also in middle-and highbrow fiction, such as that of Cary and Conrad” (86). How do we decide when to ironize and when to call out racism in literature? The fourth chapter suggests a potential third option by analyzing the protagonist of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Obi, in terms of “deracination” (103). Rather than judging Obi for his moral failing, writes Baxter, “we must attend to the way Obi is deracinated by the systems of privilege and exception introduced by colonialism” (103). It is not entirely clear, however, whether the author is referring to the way Obi is caught up in the racial hierarchies imposed by colonialism or just the (etymologically warranted) sense of “deracination” as uprooting. In order to compare numerous forms of prose narrative, Baxter reasonably brackets drama and poetry. Still, Baxter’s lens offers insights beyond the selected genres. In Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, set in the 1940s though written in the 1970s, one of the most famous District Officers in Nigerian literature, Simon Pilkings, tries to prevent the titular horseman, Elesin, from committing ritual suicide. Although Soyinka insists that his play is not a “clash of...