Lawino in the Library: Anthropology, Modernity, and the Profession of African Literature

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the shadowy brokerage of literary and anthropological value during the era of decolonization and its connection to the institutionalizing of African literature. Drawing on original archival research, it recovers the conversation between the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek's major long poemSong of Lawinoand the Oxford Library of African Literature, a series of oral-literature anthologies edited by Okot's and Talal Asad's advisers at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology. Instead of reciprocating the series's temporal and hierarchical assumptions, which appropriate late modernist literary criticism's nostalgic veneration of the British past,Song of Lawinoreconfigures the protocols for the textual production of oral poetry by revising social anthropology's theories of time and matter. If accounts of the departmentalization of African literature portray it as a transfer of colonial paradigms to postcolonial contexts, this interfield account of the making ofSong of Lawinocalls for an alternative history.