The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing By Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie Jackson Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing BY JEANNE-MARIE JACKSON Princeton UP, 2021. 223 pp. ISBN 9780691186450 paper. There has in the past few years been a strong reckoning with the historically fraught relationship between Africa and questions of universality, evident in works such as Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle’s In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (first published in French in 2018) and Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas astutely centers the implications of such considerations within the field of Anglophone African literature and is particularly attentive to the critical possibilities that are opened when the analytical focus is shifted away from the conventional emphasis on this literature’s “political resistance and cultural representation” (2). Jackson proposes that we instead take “African quandaries over form and representation on their own terms” (9), and the “philosophizing individual” (22), with the concomitant concerns about rationality and liberalism, thus becomes one potential foil for thinking through the tensions between the local and the global, between “locatedness and generalization” (28). “[S]eeing the novelized individual” in certain African literary texts “as a tool of philosophical generalization” (22), Jackson maintains, pushes against the usual symptomatic reception of these works, and it is in this way that the “intrinsic universal claims of African conceptuality” (43) can begin to be teased out. Through insightful, extended readings of the works of J. E. Casely Hayford, Stanlake Samkange, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Tendai Huchu, which ground the four chapters that make up the two parts of her monograph—titled “National Horizons” and “Global Recessions” to reflect “the dominant interpretive scale of the eras they treat, even where they are complicated or resisted” (19)— Jackson demonstrates how the “act of ‘doing philosophy’ within larger narrative [End Page 200] designs” (17) is just as much a preoccupation for some “African” writers as it is for “Western” ones. The crux of Jackson’s concerns is most clearly articulated in the fourth chapter, “Bodies Impolitic: African Deaths of Philosophical Suicide,” in which she reads Zimbabwean novelist Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate, & the Mathematician alongside South African writers Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive to “meditate more deeply on the trade-offs between self-exploration and self-sublimation, between movement in the world and stillness with one’s thoughts” (156). In tracing what she calls “philosophical suicide” as it is invoked in these particular novels as well as in both Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work and that of earlier African ones such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Jackson foregrounds here the contemporary shift “toward socially impotent rather than representative individualism” (147) and gestures to the potential failures of such philosophical individualism in negotiating the conceptual abstractions of the globalizing world. This decidedly contrasts the way in which the writers from the era of national independence that Jackson analyzes in the earlier chapters drew on “philosophy as a force for connecting the reflective individual with a nascent national community” (22). The African Novel of Ideas, which draws impressively on literature from all Anglophone regions of sub-Saharan Africa, is an important study not only for those of us who think with African literature but also for those who are invested in a more thoughtful comparative method, or what Jackson calls “[d]ecolonized conceptual comparison” (44). As Jackson emphasizes in her short epilogue, “[o]ne need not choose between Africa and universality or, for that matter, between Africa and anything else. It’s all there, to anyone committed to looking” (183). Now might be a good time to commit to looking at how certain African poets, in their complex lyric subjectivity and address, join this consequential conversation about individuality, community, and universality. Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen Northwestern University sreddyen@u.northwestern.edu WORKS CITED Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, and Jean-Loup Amselle. In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought. Translated by Andrew Brown, Polity, 2020...