African Literary Culture Research Articles

The Digital Afterlives of Dambudzo Marechera

Abstract Dambudzo Marechera who died in 1987 remains a fascinating phenomenon in African literary culture. He is very much alive in the visual culture in which he circulates digitally. He is at once posthumous, multiple, and contemporary. Even though Marechera did not live to see the 21st century, he left versions of himself that remain both relevant and resonant. This paper considers the various ways Marechera’s digital afterlives manifest and force us to interrogate the intersections of life, death, personal data and human autonomy and presents a critique of unethical digital resurrection. Who does digital Marechera belong to?

Generative transcription: The interview in post-World War 2 anglophone African literary culture

ABSTRACT This article discusses the ways in which the interview form was deployed in the 1960s and 1970s as a means to engender and critique a pan-African anglophone literary public within the context of decolonization. In so doing, it argues that the transcribed interview becomes a troublesome signifier of the legacies of colonialism while also offering a generative means by which to constitute literary publics and models of authorship across a number of newly decolonized countries. To do so, the article draws on three collections: broadcast interviews produced by the BBC’s English-language African service with host Edward Blishen; broadcast interviews produced by the London-based Transcription Centre, an organization dedicated to promoting anglophone African culture and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom; and satirical interviews published over several issues of the leading little magazine of African arts and culture, Transition.

Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data

AbstractDigital iterations of African literary texts present scholarly opportunities to interrogate how literature produced and circulated on digital media becomes entangled with the capitalist politics of datafication. In the data paradigm described in the article, literary representations are subject to the workings of neoliberal capital and the constraints of algorithmic systems. Through a postcolonial approach that puts the digital humanities in conversation with African literary studies, the article transcends how digital technologies have evidently changed African literature and tackles the costs of digital literary cultures and networks from Africa. I examine data relations through an African literary culture, which, in the current moment, indisputably exhibits the attainment of new and complex elements including the integration of digital affordances in the production and critical reception of texts. How African literary expressions in a digital age circulate in market-driven digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube makes the subjects of data capitalism or the coloniality of data as important for African literature as the expanded literary networks enabled by the digital.

“The air we breathe, a forgotten colour”:

This essay revisits the years 1961-1963 through a selection of poems written by Rajat Neogy for Transition magazine. There is an inherent tension in Neogy’s surrealism between its imaginative exposé of symbolic planes of abstract existence, and the distressing reality of post-Independent Uganda for the Asian expatriates. Avant-garde and ambitious, Transition was founded by Neogy in 1961 as an intellectually autonomous forum for East African literary culture. The magazine’s cosmopolitan contributions reflected the cosmopolitan ambience of Kampala. Born in Kampala in 1938 to East Bengali immigrant parents, Neogy’s writings are influenced by and reflect the anxieties of the expatriate communities unsure about their identity and status in the post-Independent scheme of things.

Tropicalizing Philip Quaque: On African Atlantic Literatures

Whereas slave narratives are classics of eighteenth-century studies, there has been scant attention to African eighteenth-century writing written by parties implicated in the slave trade. That absence reduces the diversity of African statements about the slave trade and African participation in the pre-abolition Atlantic world. Using the letters of Philip Quaque, as a case study, I argue that attention to the sparse eighteenth-century West African literary culture complicates the repertoire of African representations of the slave-trading Atlantic world.

Race, Style, and the Soul of Saul Bellow’s Prose

‘WHO IS THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.’1 What Saul Bellow said in 1988 during an interview with the New York Times Magazine has damaged his reputation. His views on race, and culture more broadly, don’t make him a fashionable writer. In a soundbite culture, where an individual remark is enough to remove an author from the serious regard of the politically conscientious, it would seem that those passionate about his work should redirect attention away from the interviews, and towards the fiction. Bellow is often championed as a stylist, one of the greatest prose writers of the twentieth century; a defensive action, perhaps, on the part of his admirers, as if style could ever be divorced from content. Cynthia Ozick describes a celebratory symposium of 2005 at which James Wood, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan waxed lyrical over Bellow’s prose. Arguing, however, that ‘language – the acclaimed style – cannot be the whole’ of his achievement, she asks where was the century, the century that Bellow’s reality-stung inquisitiveness traversed almost in its entirety, from Trotsky to Wilhelm Reich to Rudolf Steiner, where was the raw and raucously shifting society he knocked about in, undermined, reveled in, and sometimes reviled? Where was his imagined Africa, where were the philosophies he devoured, where were the evanescent infatuations he pursued, where was the clamor of history…?2 But Bellow’s infamous remark about Zulus and Papuans doesn’t only reveal his ignorance of African literary culture and his fear of the black presence in US life; it also expresses a, to him, essential aspect of the creative imagination. Bellow wanted ‘the soul to speak out at the dinner table’, and no doubt felt he was doing, in his ‘Zulus and Papuans’ gambit, something …

“O! Sir I do not know either to kill myself or to stay”: Childhood Emotion, Poverty, and Literary Culture in Nigeria, 1900–1960

This article concerns the expression of fearful emotions in the correspondence of Nigerian children written to the British colonial government requesting assistance during the 1940s. Unlike most existing works that use materials composed by adults to research children’s history, this paper employs sources composed by children themselves. It views the children’s letters as an integral aspect of colonial African literary culture, an important contribution that scholars have overlooked. The overall objective of this article is to stimulate the study of the emotions of African children within the broader history of social change during the first half of the twentieth century.

The challenge of designing a collaborative reference source for Southern African Literature

Finding the right balance between editorial control and the widest possible participation by user-contributors is a critical challenge for the editors of the ESAACH Wiki. The Wiki is the online collaborative reference repository of the Encyclopaedia of South African Arts, Culture and Heritage (ESAACH). The provision of wider access to information on South African literary culture is a founding principle of the ESAACH project, and wider collaboration in authoring and editing the content of the ESAACH Wiki is an extension of this aspiration. In this article we consider the place of encyclopaedias and literary companions in the context of other tertiary sources, and then go on to discuss the pros and cons of the emerging Open Access (OA) movement to make research information more freely available on the Internet. The meaning of ‘collaboration’ is examined within the framework of new open source technologies that invite multiple authorship and review, and which allow practical expression of ‘commons-based peer production’ (CBPP) and associated notions such as ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and ‘publish-then-filter.’ To identify best practice and thereby refine guidelines for ESAACH Wiki content creation, selected South African literary and biographical reference sources were compared and evaluated. Criteria established in cognate studies of tertiary reference sources both in traditional printed form and on the Internet, were used as a basis for the comparison. It is proposed that the future development model for ESAACH be one that encourages open user participation, filtered by a team of ESAACH-approved editors.

Materiality and the madness of reading: J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello as post‐apartheid text*

Summary Unlike the “situationsl metafiction” (Attwell 1993: 20) of J.M. Coetzee's earlier novels, whose imbrication in the political matrix of the late‐apartheid State has become a matter of critical orthodoxy, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) rejects a South African emplacement for its writer‐protagonist and hereby seems to suspend questions relating to the positioning of this work within post‐apartheid literary culture. Coetzee's privileging of the transcultural, or formal aesthetic, dimensions of the work ratifies the normative exclusion of the historical master‐narrative in the name of universalism (Butler 2000). Yet, for all that it defensively forecloses the possibility of “post‐apartheid South Africa” being taken as its referent, I claim, “Lesson 8: At the Gate”, of Elizabeth Costello contains a persistent interrogation of the relations between representation and material embodiment that draws the text back ‐ despite itself ‐ into the semiotic matrix of South African literary culture, here to intersect the working through of these relations in extraliterary form before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The survie/survival of the material body before a tribunal oriented towards “confession” (Coetzee 2003: 211) presents an opportunity for the haunted and displaced analogy with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that my paper pursues.

“A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger”: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid

Under apartheid, discussions of literary function and value in South African literature in English are refracted through an elaborate rhetoric that posits “urgency” as the necessary correlative and consequence of political commitment. My essay examines this “rhetoric of urgency”in the context of the overwhelmingly realist dominant of South African literary culture in English. I suggest that South African literary critics of both liberal and radical orientations have been unwitting partners in a commonly held instrumentalist concept of language. A clear regime of meaning may be discerned in literary studies in English which seeks to effect closure between the word and the world in order to safeguard the ethical claims of South African literary culture.

Rendering things visible: essays on South African literary culture

Rendering things visible: essays on South African literary culture