African Literary Studies Research Articles

The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives

With the recent transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, questions of translocalism have come to dominate the academic agenda. Where southern African studies has engaged with transnationalism, this has generally been pursued through the framework of the black Atlantic. This article argues that we need to supplement this perspective with a systematic engagement with the Indian Ocean. The article outlines various major historiographical traditions associated with the Indian Ocean and then seeks to draw out how these themes challenge assumptions which have been theorised on the basis of black Atlantic patterns. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a consideration of the Indian Ocean would enlarge the maps of South African literary and cultural studies.

Introduction: Yvonne Vera's Fictions and the Voice of the Possible

Introduction:Yvonne Vera’s Fictions and the Voice of the Possible Liz Gunner and Neil Ten Kortenaar This collection of papers on the work of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who died in Canada in April 2005, comes, with the exception of one paper, from the colloquium on her writing held at the Centre for African Literary Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in September of the same year.1 We wished to hold an event that in some way honored and commemorated her as a powerful artist who belonged firstly to the African continent and to Zimbabwe, but also to the world and perhaps particularly to Canada. At a commemorative gathering for Vera held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, on 30 June 2005, Terence Ranger told of how, after her funeral in Toronto, Yvonne Vera's ashes were left partly with her Canadian husband and the rest were taken back to Zimbabwe with her mother (BZS). The South African novelist Lauretta Ngcobo opened the Colloquium with a provocative address titled "Portraits of the African Present." Several of her remarks chimed with themes in the papers that followed. Ngcobo, who is a member of the KwaZulu Provincial Legislature, pointed to a contradiction: a growing mood of assertion among African women in claiming "their new roles in society"; yet a profound inequality that still marked affairs of gender in African societies. "No matter what African women have done to fight side by side with African men in the liberation struggle, the tension between men and women remains the same, if not worse" she said (1). Ngcobo noted "a revolt in the voice' in Yvonne Vera's early collection of short stories, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals, where "she probes this stubborn refusal to change in matters of gender and sexuality" (2). Turning to power, the oral imagination, and an alternative stream of narrative in Zulu oral tales, Lauretta Ngcobo noted powerful women such as Mabhejana "who has a horn on her head in front of which no man can stand," and Nananabosele who faces and overcomes a child-eating elephant "despite his bulk and brute force" (2–3). As part of this "revolt in the voice," Robert Muponde's reading of Vera's Under the Tongue in this collection notes how in a time of trauma an alternative knowledge and subjectivity exists through Grandmother's songs and storytelling to the young girl Zhizha. Paul Zeleza's paper points to her fiction as continually [End Page 1] dissolving the continued binary between orality and literacy as Vera gives voice to the pain inflicted on the African woman's mind and body by colonial and postcolonial patriarchies. The emphasis on reinterpreting, and on alternative narratives, by Lauretta Ngcobo is also a key feature of the work of the new cadre of critics and creative writers who continue to publish challenging and innovative texts even as the country's political leaders carve out a narrow, exclusive, and selective version of its culture and history. Readers of Research in African Literatures will have seen the review article by Flora Veit-Wild on a number of these works in volume 37, number 3. The new "patriotic history" that emanates from government sources and that educational institutions, secondary and tertiary, are now being asked to teach leaves no room for counternarratives or open discursive spaces where new questions can be asked, new routes pursued. Control of the print media as well as radio and television ensures that no systematic development of a counternarrative can be undertaken by any group in the country, a point that Terence Ranger makes forcefully in his essay, "Rule by Historiography: The Struggle over the Past in Contemporary Zimbabwe," in the recent collection of essays edited by Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac, Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture (241). The strand of cultural—and ethnic—nationalism now being deployed by "patriotic history" makes use of what Lene Bull-Christiansen has usefully termed a "spiritual temporality." This allows for "a spiritual connection between the initial anti-colonial struggle and the liberation war" known widely as the Second Chimurenga (60). The term the Third Chimurenga...

Male-male relationships in J.M. Coetzee’s <i>Disgrace</i>

Kochin (2002:8) makes the following interesting observation regarding the life of the main character, David Lurie, in Coetzee’s novel, “Disgrace” (1999), and his observation will be explored in detail when analysing the novel, and in particular the presentation of masculinities: “Lurie has no relationship of depth with men. His one effort is with Isaacs, Melanie’s father, and seems to be more of a quest for the sources of Melanie’s beauty than the expression of a desire for friendship with a man.” The focus of my investigation is on male-male relationships and the way in which they impact on the other characters in the novel. What contribution does the novel make to the debate on masculinity within the context of South African literary studies?

Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction Ann Elizabeth Willey Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt Bayreuth African Studies 73. Bayreuth: Pia Thielmann and Eckhard Breitinger, 2005. 285 pp. ISBN 3-927510-88-2 paper. Katrin Berndt presents us with an encyclopedic overview of Zimbabwean fiction in English, and this is indeed the main strength of her intervention, Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction. While the field of postcolonial cultural studies in general, and African literature in particular, continues to struggle with the definitions, implications, and ramifications of globalization, the categories of national literatures may seem to be an outdated rubric. As Berndt's study demonstrates, however, there is still some value to examining bodies of literature in national terms. Through comparative readings, Berndt's work brings to light the on-going conversation between books coming from the same national space. Her study examines Zimbabwean literature in English centrally concerned with female characters, whether written by men or women. For the sake of her argument, Berndt divides this corpus up into three main genres: the bildungsroman, the "metahistorical" novel, and the realistic/didactic novel. In each case, she examines what she identifies as the different "identity layers" of the female protagonists and argues that female identity in all of these genres resembles a palimpsest of often conflicting constructions of female identity that the female characters more or less successfully seek to negotiate. While Berndt's work is helpful in tracing some of the literary lineages that shape contemporary Zimbabwean fiction, it can be a bit of a rough going at times due to both a lack of careful proofreading and a tendency to overexplain basic concepts of literary scholarship with which it is safe to assume most of her audience is familiar. For example, there is a twenty-page discussion (199–220) of the definition and role of "flat" characters, didacticism, and realistic fiction. Her larger argument about the correspondence between flat characters in realistic fiction and symbolic types in orature gets lost in the overly reductive and simplistic explanations of basic narrative theory. For example, her definition of Structuralism (203) adds little to contemporary debates about the advantages or disadvantages of structuralism as a mode of reading, and its relevance to her larger argument is unclear. Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction has both strengths and weaknesses: it is truly comprehensive in its overview of the primary literature it takes as its object of study, but it also rehearses some of the more common theoretical stances of the field. It rightly pays a great deal of attention to the now-canonical [End Page 212] figures of Zimbabwean literature (Dangaremgba, Vera, and Hove) but limits the space given to an examination of the materials that readers are less likely to know about and in which they are much more likely to be interested. While Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction can be theoretically reductive at times, it is a valuable resource for those looking to expand their readings in Zimbabwean fiction in English. It is also an indication that the study of African literature may still have something to gain by interrogating the framework of national literatures. Ann Elizabeth Willey University of Louisville Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press

Introductory Comments: Ato Quaysonis Calibrations: Reading for the Social

The articles in this section were first presented at the panel "Reading for the Social: Socio-Cultural Transactions and Ato Quayson's Calibrations"* at the Thirtieth African Literature Association conference held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 2004. The panel itself was part of a new presentation program instituted by the organizers called "Special Seminars." Designed to provide extended time for robustly critical ruminations on a subject, a "seminar" was conceived and executed as a set of three panels over three days on the same theme, and with precirculated papers. The panel "Reading for the Social" was one of the three of the seminar titled "On Theory," which I organized; the other two are "Institutions, Contexts, Politics" I and II. There is already quite substantial food for thought in the critical discussions below of Quayson's book and his response to them. So I remark here not on the book as such but on the significant occasion for very critical, lively, and open exchanges on theoretical matters that it provided. Colleagues and graduate students, apparently more richly stimulated than usual, approached me after the panel (and [End Page 95] the other two also) to express their appreciation and to make a plea that theory matters become a permanent seminar feature at ALA conferences. A few said they had wondered whether it was possible to avidly discourse on theory at the ALA "without guilt." I was not surprised by this reaction. After all, most of us in African literary studies have always had a kind of ambiguous relationship to "theory," whatever way that is conceived. But it is not that we do not do theory—we do that in all of our writings whether we are aware of it or not. What we certainly do not do enough of is self-reflexive critical theoretical engagement of theory. Judging from the responses to the seminar—and for those who were not there, the vibrant energy of the debates below—it is surely time we encourage and direct more effort into the field- enriching task of metatheoretical exertions the like of which Ato Quayson's book for that occasion provided an excellent example.

The principle of the principal as principal: Narratorial identity and perspective in Alan Paton's Diepkloof stories

Alan Paton's short fiction remains a neglected area in South African literary studies. Apart from ephemeral reviews, only a handful of critical works have paid any attention to Paton's stories, and most of these have tended to regard the stories as slight and fragmentary. It is my contention, however, that there is much of interest and value in Paton's stories, not only as literary works, but for what they reveal about Paton's response to the historical era in which they were produced. This article focusses on the “Diepkloof stories”, which explore his experiences as Principal of Diepkloof Reformatory. Though set at the time of his principalship in the 1930s and 1940s, they were written in the 1950s – after the publication of Cry, the Beloved Country, and, importantly, during the first decade of the National Party's implementation of apartheid. Viewed as a contemporaneous reaction to the unfolding events of the time, they represent a perspective different from that of Cry, the Beloved Country and of his non‐fictional writing, one that is bleaker, more sombre, even pessimistic. The stories hover between the genres of autobiography and fiction, participating in the conventions of both but never fully committing themselves to either category. The tension between Paton's public identity as writer and social activist and his multivalent role in the stories as author, narrator, main character and source material, marks the stories as unique in South African literature, and raises intriguing narratological questions about the status of the texts.

Fabrications and the question of a National South African literature

Summary The discourse in South African literary studies, post‐colonial and general literary studies on the phenomenon of a national literature, this essay contends, is vague and undertheorised. It critically examines claims made by various scholars in the field of South African and post‐colonial studies concerning the existence of a South African national literature and proceeds to identify the conceptual difficulties and confusions attendant to the concept of a national literature. It explores the meanings of the terms “nation”, “nationalism”, “nation‐state” and provides a definition of what a “national literature” is. Based on this definition, it concludes that South Africa is a state without a nation and thus a state without a national literature.

African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict (review)

Reviewed by: African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict Leora Maltz African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict Ed. Tobias Döring Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. A special edition of Matatu, the journal of African literary and cultural studies, African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum extends the interdisciplinary scope of the journal to address the topic of contemporary African art. Editor Tobias Döring describes the volume as intended to coincide with, and to complement, Documenta XI, "to map out sites/ sights of creativity and conflict when facing contemporary arts form Africa" (3). Strengths of the book thus include the geographic and academic range of the nineteen contributors, among them scholars based in Africa, as well as lesser-known voices in the field, including literary specialists who ponder the arts as insightful nonprofessionals. The editor has also made an exemplary effort to expand the geographic purview of the book beyond the usual suspects of Nigeria and South Africa, to include research on Eritrea, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Christine Matzke begins the volume on a strong note, with an historically grounded article on Eritrean art that offers a much-needed contribution to this neglected area of study, as does Sunanda Sanyal's illuminating piece on Ugandan artist Rose Kirumira. Both of these articles—of women writing about female artists—indicate the laudable gender parity maintained throughout the volume. [End Page 187] Arranged in a loosely geographic fashion, with groups of articles linked by place strung together, this anthology lacks organizational clarity, however. Instead of thematic, chronological, or even geographic subsections, the editor has employed the journal's usual structure, segmenting the book by literary genre (a long list of articles, an interview with South African artist Sue Williamson, a couple of reviews). For a book, unlike a journal, this structure is not particularly effective. The table of contents, likewise arranged by genre, adds another layer of confusion by failing to list the book's contents in sequential order. It also seemed as if the volume had been expanded from an original, tighter focus on contemporary African art to the more amorphous subject of "African Culture" signaled by the book's rather noncommittal title: African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum. This all-encompassing purview jars with the stated editorial conception of producing a volume devoted to visual art: for example, all three contributions to the "Marketplace" section (by Omar Sougou, Alex Asigbo, and Tracie Chima Utoh) not only seem unrelated to the market (discussing literature and theater as they do), but also bear only the most tangential relationship to the ostensible subject of the volume, contemporary African art. Nonetheless, other contributors engage directly with the subject at hand and this book is certainly well worth reading for anyone interested in contemporary African art. Moreover, several contributors respond to Tobias Döring's seminal question—"whether the Museum, as an institutional site, can ever be decolonized" (7). In this context, several German commentators provide frank, often critical, reviews of local African art exhibitions. Their insights convey a refreshing perspective, especially since this type of localized discourse usually appears in ephemeral publications with limited circulation, often written in German, and thus largely inaccessible to American readers on several counts. Dirk Naguschewski engages with the institutionalized neocolonialism still operative in several Parisian exhibitions of African art, while Robert Stockhammer queries the nationalistic assumption behind The Short Century's celebration of African independence in an era of supposed postnationalisms. But perhaps the most relevant and creative response to Döring's challenging museological conundrum is the article by Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen Roberts, a nuanced and well-argued piece on the phenomenon of unofficial museums in Dakar, Senegal. They discuss an extensive mural by local artist Pape Samb ("Papisto") featuring a sufi saint, Amadou Bamba, as a means of expanding the concept of what constitutes a museum. Given the tangled histories of colonialism and the museum, the emergence of this kind of informal, nontraditional space for recording local histories poses a powerful alternative to the hegemony of the colonial museum. The authors propose that Papisto's mural be considered an "informal 'museum'" created...

Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way

Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way

Nonidentity and reciprocity in conceptualising South African literary studies

In his essay, The Task of Translator, first published as preface to his translations of Baudelaire's poetry, from French into German, Walter Benjamin stresses what he calls translatability of all literary works. This is possible Benjamin (1992: 73) claims, due to basic reciprocal relationship between He likens this reciprocity to of marked by a distinctive convergence. Writing from a European linguistic context, he states: Languages are not strangers to one another, but are a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to say. All languages, in others words, are vehicles for a range of common articulations. In what seems like a countermove, he stresses specificity of languages. This uniqueness, according to him, marks limits of translation and announce untranslatable aspect of language as manifested in phenomenon of nonequivalence at all linguistic levels: lexical denotation and connotation, semantic, syntactic and contextual. Because languages are distinct, they are marked by difference so that according to Benjamin (1973: 74) it stands to reason that kinship does not necessarily stand for likeness. This nonidentity, understood in sense formulated by Heidegger (1960: 15) with regard to identity, should not be viewed as sameness, expressed as A=A, or self-coincidence or abstract equality, phrased as the jejune emptiness of what, in absence of internal relations, remains in persisting monotony but is also applicable to literary works. In Saussurian parlance, this nonidentity is not something fixed or essential but a nonpositive, relational phenomenon. To be sure, for Benjamin, nonidentity, likewise, implies reciprocality and other way round. What do these two concepts, nonidentity and reciprocity, pertaining to an essay on translation, have to do with South African literary studies? On face of it, apart from translation practices and studies relevant to a multilingual field, very little if not nothing. Such a conclusion, of course, issues from face of matters: face here signifying surface of things. I enlist these two concepts because they are handy here in what is an attempt to chart ways in which field of South African literary studies has been conceptualised over time. 1 South African literary studies, which this special issue of JLS and another to follow are devoted to, has been beset by conceptual exigencies since beginning of twentieth century when reference to South African literature first came into circulation. These difficulties, while arising from many interrelated factors, can largely be attributed to changing ideological perspectives which shaped successive political, cultural, linguistic orders and their inscription in academic practices for almost a century. This produced a society with a cultural order of discursive divisions, fragmentations, shifts and instabilities flowing from linguistic and literary divisions which developed in wake of ethnic division of South Africa well before but especially after 1948. This either precluded an inclusive conceptualisation or marginalised such conceptualisation for much of century. In addition, sway of poststructuralist theory, with its suspicion of grand conceptualisations during last quarter of twentieth century, also played a role in barring approach to object. With its emphasis on heterogeneity and difference and a rejection of anything suggesting homogenisation, particularities of various South African literatures were regarded as mutually exclusive systems beyond capture of theoretical systematisation. Independently and in combination, these factors checked attempts at arriving at even an operational definition which admitted to object of South African literary studies not as sum of its parts but as a field where both reciprocity between languages and their nonidentity could be approached. …

ABDELMAJID HANNOUM, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine, Studies in African Literature (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001). Pp. 235. $59.95 cloth.

ABDELMAJID HANNOUM, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine, Studies in African Literature (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001). Pp. 235. $59.95 cloth.

Lament for a Notion

Lament for a Notion Stephen Slemon E nglish Studies in Ca na d a have not always played nicely in the institutional schoolyard.1We have run in the usual races for decreasing Arts Faculty resources; we have skipped alongside other programs while obedient administrative prefects turned maniacally at the ropes and made us trip. But at the same time, reports have been filed which document a sustained proclivity within us towards bullying: marble-stealing in the allocations pool, fighting with the language programs, and ganging up on the little guys, especially on that newcomer to the school whose name implicitly speaks “foreignness” to the object-driven identitarian programs by virtue of its toponomic binocularity. Comparative Literature in Canada is the kid who wears glasses. He sits between grades and is accepted by neither of them. He brings in toys with funny names, like alterity, and intertextuality, and differance—everyone steals them. He blames us for his constantly bloody nose. This pattern of behaviour should trouble participants in both programs, but higher education in Canada is in a post-Darwinian free market, not a l In this review essay, I shall discuss the following book only: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death ofa Discipline. (The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory.) Cloth. Pp. 128. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. u.s. $22.50. ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 207-218 St ep h en Slem o n teaches postcolonial literatures and theory in the Department of English, University of Alberta. zero tolerance zone for institutional violence, and the Western university has always sought to know more about aggressor cultures than about the aggrieved. Punch in “why kids bully” on a Google search, and the first hit takes you to a Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, page that produces several key insights into the skewed sociability of English Studies in Canada. Kids bully, says the website, because "someone else ... is picking on them." They bully because “they think the world revolves around them.” Above all they bully because “they have no true friends and feel lonely”2 Affective incommen­ surability is the old story of institutionalized English Studies. Secular heirs to John Henry Newman’s idea of the university, we imagine ourselves at the centre of the academia’s domestic life, but in actual practice we find our­ selves banished to the red room during university moments of important decision-making and thus liminally positioned between identities: are we Jane Eyre, or are we John Reed? Our disciplinary cousin, Comparative Lit­ erature, reports us to have said: “you have no business to take our books.” Punch in “why kids get bullied” on Google, however, and the computer will tell you that “your search did not match any documents.” One under­ stands in an instant why it is that English Studies in Canada have arrived at a disciplinary moment of hulking self-interest, arrested development, and line-management violence, while Comparative Literature Studies cower self-protectively in profound institutional crisis. English Studies have a future within the institution, though it bids fair to be a deeply undistin­ guished one. Comparative Literature Studies may soon be stricken from the academic rolls. Or so it is at my University. The Department of Comparative Litera­ ture was once one of academia’s great success stories at the University of Alberta. From within it, Stephen Arnold in the 1970s framed the project of comparative Anglophone/Francophone West African literary studies. A decade later E. D. Blodgett penned a discipline-shaking proposal for a comparative Canadian literary studies, en route to his winning a Governor General’s Prize for poetry. A decade after that, Nasrin Rahimieh developed an iconoclastic and far-reaching challenge to the methodological orthodox­ ies of Middle Eastern Studies—the result is her 2001 monograph Missing Persians.3 In the late 1980s the Department of Comparative Literature was named a University centre of excellence. Its graduate program was consis­ tently top-ranked. But Comparative Literature is no longer a Department 2 http://www.rnccornerbrook.nf.ca/new_page_12.htm 3 Nasrin Rahimieh: Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural His­ tory. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001. 208 ! Slemon at the University of Alberta. It amalgamated with Film Studies in 1992...

Ayi Kwei Armah: Radical Iconoclast: Pitting Imaginary Worlds against the Actual (review)

Ayi Kwei Armah is a world-class novelist and one of Africa's finest, but also a most politically controversial writer whose works have attracted some of the most biased criticism in the history of African literary studies. Ode Ogede's book surpasses any critical analysis that has yet been published, especially with regard to understanding the essence of Armah's narrative style and themes and their respective evolutionary paths of development. The book provides an enlightening close textual reading of Armah's novels, short stories, and essays both in relationship to one another and to the body of texts constituting African prose narratives. Furthermore, Ogede simultaneously engages an informed and balanced discourse with Western critical scholarship on the African novel at the same time as he provides an elucidation of the complexities of Armah's themes and narrative methods.

HARROW Kenneth W., Less Than One and Double. A Feminist Reading of African Women's Writing, Portsmouth NH, Studies in African Literature, 2002, 350 p.

HARROW Kenneth W., Less Than One and Double. A Feminist Reading of African Women's Writing, Portsmouth NH, Studies in African Literature, 2002, 350 p.

South Africa Backdrop: An Historical Introduction for South African Literary and Cultural Studies (review)

South Africa Backdrop: An Historical Introduction for South African Literary and Cultural Studies (review)

Where Are All the African and CaribbeanCritics?The MLA, Honorary Members, and Honorary Fellows

It has long been?recognized that the various institutions of literature? its publishers, critics, bookstores, clubs, and more?have substantial effects on literature itself, to the extent that one can reify that term. The growth of twentieth-century African literature, in particular, is powerfully a story of its institutions, from Presence Africaine and Heinemann's African Writers Series to the global fame, translation, and widespread adoption of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to the increasing shifts of African school and university curricula towards African writers; to the awarding of Nobel prizes to Soyinka, Gordimer, and Mahfouz; to the continuing strug? gles for non-European-language publishing, and more. The present jour? nal is also an example. For thirty years Research in African Literatures has been a leading venue for the scholarly legitimization of African writing, particularly in North America. RAL has depended in turn on other insti? tutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University Press, and has long-term relationships with two organizations?the African Literature Association, and the African Literatures Division of the Modern Language Association?for whom RAL serves as official journal. Despite the importance of all such institutions, African literary studies scholarship has focused more on tex? tual and cultural analyses than on institutional critique. Though some studies can certainly be cited,1 institutional critique most often takes the form of paragraphs in larger works. In this commentary, therefore, I will offer one such institutional cri? tique, by addressing the Africanity of the Modern Language Association's lists of Honorary Members and Honorary Fellows, twin lists that anoint or recognize, respectively, the non-North-American world's most distin? guished literary scholars, and the entire world's most distinguished writers. I focus on these lists for several reasons. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) is the largest and most influential literary society in the world: largest, by sheer number (over thirty thousand members); and most influential, in that its North base rests on the richest educational system in the world. One feature of the MLA's size and scope is that it houses more Africanist literary scholars than any other organization on the planet. Recent data from the MLA indicate that its African Literatures Division has a membership of 573, its Francophone Literatures and Cultures Division a membership of 952, its English Literature Other Than British and American division a membership of 1043, and its Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture discussion group a membership of 2,306. Once overlaps among the lists are eliminated (since MLA members may join up to five divisions or discussion groups), the MLA can be said to house almost four thousand scholars with primary or secondary Africanist

Where Are All the African and Caribbean Critics? The MLA, Honorary Members, and Honorary Fellows

It has long been?recognized that the various institutions of literature? its publishers, critics, bookstores, clubs, and more?have substantial effects on literature "itself," to the extent that one can reify that term. The growth of twentieth-century African literature, in particular, is powerfully a story of its institutions, from Presence Africaine and Heinemann's African Writers Series to the global fame, translation, and widespread adoption of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to the increasing shifts of African school and university curricula towards African writers; to the awarding of Nobel prizes to Soyinka, Gordimer, and Mahfouz; to the continuing strug? gles for non-European-language publishing, and more. The present jour? nal is also an example. For thirty years Research in African Literatures has been a leading venue for the scholarly legitimization of African writing, particularly in North America. RAL has depended in turn on other insti? tutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University Press, and has long-term relationships with two organizations?the African Literature Association, and the African Literatures Division of the Modern Language Association?for whom RAL serves as official journal. Despite the importance of all such institutions, African literary studies scholarship has focused more on tex? tual and cultural analyses than on institutional critique. Though some studies can certainly be cited,1 institutional critique most often takes the form of paragraphs in larger works. In this commentary, therefore, I will offer one such institutional cri? tique, by addressing the Africanity of the Modern Language Association's lists of Honorary Members and Honorary Fellows, twin lists that anoint or recognize, respectively, the non-North-American world's most distin? guished literary scholars, and the entire world's most distinguished writers. I focus on these lists for several reasons. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) is the largest and most influential literary society in the world: largest, by sheer number (over thirty thousand members); and most influential, in that its North American base rests on the richest educational system in the world. One feature of the MLA's size and scope is that it houses more Africanist literary scholars than any other organization on the planet. Recent data from the MLA indicate that its African Literatures Division has a membership of 573, its Francophone Literatures and Cultures Division a membership of 952, its "English Literature Other Than British and American" division a membership of 1043, and its Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture discussion group a membership of 2,306. Once overlaps among the lists are eliminated (since MLA members may join up to five divisions or discussion groups), the MLA can be said to house almost four thousand scholars with primary or secondary Africanist

Bernth Lindfors and the Archive of African Literature

In studying the work of Ben Lindfors, one gets the impression that it spans the entire history of African literature: that he began the study of African literature not only when it was in its infancy, but that he was part of that beginning of the critical work. His books and articles have been published with increasing frequency, and in recent years have encompassed more and more of the performative and historical aspects of the discipline, thus following something of the disciplinary shift from the earlier tracing of historical sources and influences and biographical studies to the cultural studies emphasis on context and performativity. In that, Lindfors has continued to be a bellwether for the discipline. The prestige journal of African literary studies, Research in African Literatures, was begun by Lindfors whose editorship continued until 1990 when he finally yielded the helm to Richard Bjornson.

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS The Marabout and the Muse: New Approaches to Islam in African Literature. Studies in African Literature Edited by KENNETH W. HARROW. Oxford: James Currey. 1996. Pp. xxiii, 239. Price PB £12.95. 0–85255–540–7. Abdulkader I. Tayob Abdulkader I. Tayob University of Cape Town Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 11, Issue 2, May 2000, Pages 267–268, https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/11.2.267 Published: 01 May 2000

“If I were her” — Fictions of development from cape town, Canada and the Caribbean: A relational reading

Summary A comparative approach to South African texts with those produced in the Americas, notably the African‐American and Afro‐Caribbean diasporas, is currently still an under‐researched area in South African literary studies. It will be argued that what has been referred to as the strategic value of a “diasporic double consciousness” can offer fresh perspectives on fictions of childhood and particularly novels of development (especially the Bildungsroman) which track an emerging subjecthood located physically and metaphorically between developing and developed countries. The focus here is on a relational reading of differently situated fictions of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood set in Cape Town, Toronto and New York. An exploration of the fictional strategies employed by Dianne Case, Marlene Nourbese Philip and Jamaica Kincaid will show how the dialectic established between “verbal” and “social” text foregrounds cultural specificity while also offering scope for reassessing both diasporic and local texts.