Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse

Abstract

After the decline of the “writing back” paradigm as a global exchange value in African literature in the 1970s and 1980s, the metropolitan circulation of new African writing has increasingly depended on an unconscious demand by transnational publishers for that old and habitual discursive idea of Africa as a negative spectacle, in spite of the idea of the modern. Some new African writing responds to a resurgent metropolitan market demand for an exotic Africa through an investment in a self-anthropologizing rhetorical style, thereby succumbing to millennial stereotypes about the “dark continent.” However, even while such texts ironically appear to “self-demonize,” they achieve literary agency and consecration in their responses. This leads to a certain, if minor, rearrangement of the power dynamic within global literary canon formation—even if an ambivalent political position in the new writer is also a simultaneous result.