“Yes, but . . .” : On Reforming African Literary Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract“Yes, but . . .” subscribes fully to the arguments on the basis of which Tejumola Olaniyan refutes the often unspoken axioms such as the “corporeal” test by which what counts as genuinely “African” in African literary scholarship is determined. In those arguments, which appear in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” (PLI 3.3 [2016]: 387–96), he outlines very explicitly the views about the objects of study, methodologies, and critical theories that have implicitly guided the most powerful scholarship on African literature at least since the 1990s. It expresses some concern, however, that, in calling for a reformation of the “ideological test” that appears to tether African Marxist criticism to the critic’s identity, Olaniyan may have inadvertently left open a back door through which the corporeal axiom could sneak back into African literary criticism. To preempt this, it questions the narrative of globalization on the basis of which he posits the category of the “Post-Global Age.” More specifically, it argues that the temporal scheme represented in the “post” in the “post-global” on which his understanding of globalization rests is flawed. Finally, substituting “late capitalism” for globalization, it argues that “If what late capitalism/globalization longs for is to render capitalism as ineluctable ‘as fate,’ then African literary criticism is obliged ‘to consider the possibility that, to the question, “Are “post,” “trans,” and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for African literature’ ” that Olaniyan poses, “the answer could be a qualified interrogative rather than a simple affirmative: ‘Yes, but . . . ?’ not ‘Yes.’ ”