Introduction: Theorising African-Language Literatures in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

African-language literatures have grown in surges during the period of decolonisation that spans nearly 50 years. Despite impressive publications, two tendencies in the appreciation of African-language literatures have dominated: there is the literary quasi-anthropological perspective whose focus has been to excavate African-language literatures in search of preserved traditional African values, very much perceived as immutable. While this approach has put African-language literatures on the world literary map, the same approach has discouraged vigorous theoretical interpretations of these literatures by using different theories. The result has been that in discussions of African literatures, most of the times critics are thinking of those literatures written in English, Portuguese, French and German. African-language literatures' theoretical criticism is therefore occluded. Furthermore, critics of African literature have been predisposed by this approach to go it soft and not to be critical or adventurous in applying varied grids of theories of literature that have become universal human heritage. African-language literatures are therefore impoverished as they are mostly not subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny using diverse literary theories. On the other hand, claiming to supersede the perceived rigidity of nationalist and Afrocentric theories of African literatures, postcolonial theories emerged, and suggest that African-language literatures could be explored for the value of resistance they can offer to different forms of oppression. Unfortunately, the kinds of postcolonial approaches imposed on them have tended to search mainly for open modes of rebellion or resistance as can be expressed in them. The result has, in some cases, been useful exposure of these literatures to typologies of postcolonial theories, but in most cases a singly focused or monolith attempt to use only postcolonial theories has resulted in the suppression of the full potential of the meanings that African-language literatures can offer. In the process, the literary richness of value embedded in African-language literatures composed from diverse cultural contexts has been compromised. Also, African-language literatures have not been allowed to suggest their own theories. The articles contained in this issues of Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap attempt to revise these faulty assumptions. The issues fill this theoretical void by examining African-language literatures through the formal means of the novel, film, poetry, and also through theoretical treatises mapping out the question as to when and why in the literary history of African literature the issue of writing in indigenous languages became an academic problem. Maurice Vambe's Postcolonial Shona Fiction of Zimbabwe directly addresses the challenges that emerge from a simplistic imposition of postcolonial theory on African-language literature. His article differentiates versions within postcolonial theory that helps him to take to task Primorac's self-defeating approach that introduces a theory categorising Shona literature as an intra-tribal outfit of the Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika people, et cetera; an approach whose ultimate goal is to fritter the concept of Shona literature until it is barely recognisable as an aspect of Zimbabwe's national culture. Vambe reinstalls a version of postcolonial theory whose promise in the analyses of Shona literature is to guarantee a refusal to retrieve from literature moments of African historical urgency that are constructed as intact, because within its scopic regime, national culture is a fluid cultural arena. In He(Art) of the Metre: Poetry in the 'Vernacular', Fasan Rotimi Omoyele opines that the historical rise of African literature in European languages, particularly English and French, as a social and disciplinary practice directed at the recuperation of the fractured African persona and world view following centuries of misrepresentation in Western-authored texts, has conferred on it an adversarial tone. …