African Novels Research Articles

The Aesthetics of ‘Waithood’ in Selected African Novels

The Aesthetics of ‘Waithood’ in Selected African Novels

Creating an Alternate Canon: Achebe to Obioma

Chigozie Obioma is a novelist of Nigerian origin who has published two novels so far. He has been hailed as an ‘heir to Chinua Achebe’ the master African novelist. The comparison of Obioma with Achebe is obvious because both of them belong to the same tribe, but what is more important is that Obioma seems to carry from the point where Achebe left. In his debut novel The Fishermen, Obioma foregrounds the problems that plague postcolonial Nigeria. In the novel, he confirms that whatever Achebe prophesied about the future of Nigeria has come true. Like his illustrious predecessor, he is critical of colonial institutions that have decimated the national culture of Nigeria. The paper is a study of Obioma’s novel The Fishermen.

Journey Towards Self-realization in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner: A Comparative Study

The Prolific South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001) and the promising Afghan writer, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) belong to New Literatures in English. The main characters in these two novels undertake their journey from their native place to foreign country in pursuit of happiness, place, prosperity and self-realization. This research paper attempts to make a comparison between Gordimer’s The Pickup and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in terms of the journey undertaken by the protagonists Abdu and Julie of The Pickup and Amir of The Kite Runner though these two novels are set in a different background.

Otherness and Marginal Spaces: Beyond Politics and Race in Contemporary African Novels

Many postcolonial literary scholars associate otherness with the political and racial marginalisation of groups. Indomitable postcolonial voices such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said take this trajectory, thereby negating other aspects of otherness that come with severe consequences for characters in literary works. Current scholarship on otherness focuses on any placement of groups at the margins without emphasis on the political and racial elements explored by Fanon and Said. Othering is viewed as either the inability to see people who are different as part of one’s community or a failure to see oneself as part of the community. This article extends the second argument that otherness goes further than discrimination against a group as a result of race and political ideology. Using postcolonial theory, the article analyses other aspects of otherness by comparing three primary texts: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame (1983) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009). The ideas of Fanon (1961), Rorty (1993) and Powell and Menendian (2016) will form a theoretical basis of interpretation.

Patriarchy in Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power: A Gynocentric Approach

African literature has been dominated by male African writers. However, there are a number of female African writers who contributed to the literary landscape of the continent significantly. In line with this, researches that deal with issues of gender in African literature are increasing (Fonchingong, 2006; Salami-Boukari, 2012; Stratton, 1994). In this study, I aim to expose patriarchal oppression in two selected post-colonial African novels. I ask “How do postcolonial African female writers expose gender oppression and patriarchy in their novels?” I ask how the female characters in the selected novels resist patriarchal dominance and oppression. I seek to uncover any thematic patterns and/or overlaps that would emerge across the selected novels. To achieve this, I analyze two feminist Anglophone African novels by female writers of the continent, namely ‘The Slave Girl’ and ‘A Question of Power’. Gynocentrism is used as an approach to achieve this purpose. The analyses of the novels make it feel that patriarchy is used as a tool to stabilize the discrimination of the feminine gender. The heroines in both novels are found to be patriarchal women with some attempt to reverse the gender order. The major female characters in the novels stand against the intersectional discrimination of the feminine from the male personhood, religion, as well as colonial culture. These discussions about patriarchy revive the vitality of African feminist novels to the present readers.

“In an African context”: Eustace Palmer’s critical studies of African women’s writing

Eustace Palmer’s volumes of criticism on African literature have provided a continually updated introduction to major African novelists and perceptive analyses of their works. In Of War and Women, Oppression and Optimism: New Essays on the African Novel (2008), Palmer recognized the growing number of women’s voices as one of the new trends in the African novel. He offered readings of several landmark works by women that emphasized the cultural matrices within which they had been created and placed them in the context of African feminisms. This article explores Palmer’s approaches to African women’s writing in the volume, focusing on his presentation of So Long a Letter by the Senegalese author Mariama Bâ and relating his criticism of Bâ’s narrative to other interpretations of her work. Finally, it references the response of critics to Palmer’s treatment of African women’s writing, illustrating the impact of his Africa-centered scholarship within the discipline.

Racial Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic and an active translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature. His novels are conspicuous for their well- crafted composition, pregnant dialogues and analytical brilliance. Coetzee’s earlier novels question the apartheid regime, while his later works offer an apocalyptic vision of post- apartheid South Africa. His major works include Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Age of Iron and The Childhood of Jesus. In 1999, Coetzee has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies. Coetzee became the first author to be twice awarded the Booker Prize, winning it as second time for Disgrace which portrays the post-apartheid society. Coetzee went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 for his entire body of works. During the years of apartheid, he was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement among writers. Scholar Isadore Dalia labelled J.M Coetzee as one of the most distinguished white writers with an anti-apartheid sentiment. Coetzee’s earlier novels question the apartheid regime, while his later works offer an apocalyptic vision of post- apartheid South Africa. Disgrace can be analyzed as a representative work of the new south Africa where the social problems relating binary oppositions such as black- white, white- immigrant, powerless- powerful, are stressed. This paper attempts to show through the protagonist, David Lurie, that the way to adapt to the changes in the country is to make a fresh start, a way to adapt to the new times, where no ideas of the old are retained. Frantz Fanon’s concepts within the field of post colonialism which he articulated in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (1963) have much relevance in Disgrace. The objective of this paper is to stretch his new ideas in a new direction by applying his theories on nation and culture onto a white subject Lurie, a white native South African. In the light of Fanon’s text, The Wretched of the Earth it can be argued that following the revolutionary political changes in South Africa in 1994, the former colonizer can be seen in the same way as the colonized usually is: a powerless native, regardless of racial identity.

Point-of-View In Meja Mwangi's Novels

This essay is poised to examine Mwangi’s manipulation of one of the salient fictional techniques which is sometimes neglected. Point-of-view is perhaps one of the vital methods of achieving aesthetic vision. This practical technique in fiction is surveyed to prove its relationship in revealing intentional meaning. By uncovering the differences in the study of African novels, this discourse chooses to toe the steps of formalism as the best approach to the study of African novels especially Mwangi’s novels. Readers have only one open door to the novelistic modus operandi, and that is the narrator’s voice, which holds the key to the reader’s comprehension and digestion of the work. Mwangi offers this comprehension by the use of both participant and non-participant narrators to suit each circumstance he desires to explore. This fictional method has been demonstrated to have brought together his themes and made his works meaningful to the reader.

Setting in Meja Mwangi’s Novels

Setting is perhaps the highest priority in Meja Mwangi‟s literary rigours. Effectiveness of his setting reveals meaning and determines actions, aspirations, and destinies of the characters in specific time and place. Setting reveals Mwangi‟s crucial manipulative devices and his aesthetic vision. This study proves that setting combines with other devices of the author to achieve significant meaning through close perusal of the text. After all, according to Nnolim, a critic: … is a mediator between the specialists and the layman between the work of art and its readership or audience. The critic‟s social function is, therefore to be of some use to the reader in helping the reader understand the work in question. It is the duty of the critic also to arouse enthusiasm for the work by getting the reader buy and read the work. A sound critic must above all, be objective and detached. (89). Objectively, Mwangi‟s setting influences his characters and brings to view frustrated young men whom Angus Calder deemed „Mwangian man‟ because they are influence by the harsh and acrimonious environment. Asika holds that setting helps to make the readers believe and sometimes anticipate the actions of characters in tandem with social milieu… (73). The hopeless and harsh environment transforms the characters to perfidious cheats, drunks, and prostitutes that need urgent salvation. By discovering the diversity in the study of African novels, this study demonstrates that formalism is the best approach to Mwangi‟s works; considering his literariness and ignoring all extraneous matters.

The Wild <i>Volksmoeder </i>in the Forest: An Analysis of the Human-Nonhuman Relationship in Dalene Matthee’s <i>Dreamforest</i> (2003)

South African novelist Dalene Matthee’s last forest novel, Dreamforest, was published in 2003. This novel concludes her tetralogy of historical fiction novels focusing on the poor white timber community living in the Eastern Cape’s tropical Knysna forest. Initially the representation of a human-nonhuman relationship in Dreamforest suggests a connection between the sexist and classist treatment of the protagonist, Karoliena, and the deforestation of the Knysna forest. When Karoliena rejects the town’s prescript of Afrikaner nationalist volksmoeder identity, which South African theorist, Elsabé Brink (1990: 280), describes as an emulation of characteristics including a ‘sense of religion, bravery, a love of freedom, the spirit of sacrifice, self-reliance, [and] housewifeliness’, it is suggested that she opposes homogenous, monolithic racial and gender classifications. However, the reunion of Karoliena and Johannes at the end of the novel initiates Karoliena’s acceptance of the volksmoeder identity, and by implication, her rejection of the forest. Her return to Johannes therefore suggests that the nonhuman is only ever an instrument in the poor white Afrikaans woman’s search for identity and her feminist upliftment project(s). The following article analyses the depiction of this human-nonhuman relationship, primarily utilising Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s work in whiteness studies.

Generic fracturing in Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth

Based on a stylistic analysis of selected African novels, centrally Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar/White Teeth (1953; English translation: 1989), this article identifies a narrative technique employed by these novels, to use heterogeneous genres inserted into the prose fiction of the novel. Typically, various genres of poetry are used in this way, creating a textuality that is richly “heteroglossic” (Bakhtin, 1981). However, the range of genres that can be used in this way is not limited and includes proverbs, sayings, songs, newspaper articles, letters, or more recently digital texts such as blogs or tweets. The article uses the term “generic fracturing” to refer to this technique. Generic fracturing is used in novels for specific purposes. The article focuses on the employment of a genre of Acoli praise poetry, mwoc, in White Teeth for characterization. It is further argued here that such heterogeneous genres do not only serve to construct the narrative, but are in fact markers of thought systems that differ from the “default” ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics of the novel. These features were inherited from the genre’s European history and imposed in Africa by colonial administration through which novelistic production was initially engineered. Generic fracturing is thus a textual strategy to effectuate disruptions and subversions of an intellectual framework that was a colonial imposition, and it points towards alternative ways of thinking. These were usually derived from local African cultural traditions in early African-language novelistic production. Generic fracturing, however, continues being used up to the present day in African novels to signal the co-existence and interaction of heterogeneous knowledges and philosophical frameworks.

Female Readers as Literary Critics: Reading Experiences of Kano Market Romance Fiction

This paper aims to explore the female readers reading experiences, views and feelings of Hausa romance novels found in most of the northern part of Nigeria. This article also examines some criticism and accusations against the readership and content of the Hausa romance genre. The study applied the Transactional Reader-Response Theory of Rosenblatt’s (1978) as guide by selecting 7 female readers within the age ranges between 22-26 years from 2 book clubs to participate in the study. The findings revealed that all the readers individually were able to reveal their varied responses, beliefs, and experiences on the value of the romance novels which challenged the assertion made by the literary critics and traditional society that the books have no relevance in their life activities which supported their arguments and personal interpretive reading stance towards the Hausa romance genre. The finding yielded four themes were emerging: (a) promoting literacy development; (b) resistance to the traditional marriage system in society; (d) enlightening females on social inequality. These findings provided empirical support for the application of the Transactional Reader-Response Theory of Rosenblatt (1978) outside classroom contexts to understand the role of African romance novels towards female social transformation.

Plagues in Palimpsest: Historical Time and Narrative Time in Diane Awerbuck’s Home Remedies, Marcus Low’s Asylum and Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues

This article takes as premise that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has left South Africans, along with the rest of the world, feeling acutely aware of their own historicity. The idea of historical self-awareness coalescing around major social and historical shifts has been expertly theorized already, but I hope to offer a reading of this phenomenon through three post-2000 South African novels that deal with the theme of plague. A reading of Ricoeur’s work on time and narrative, combined with Bakhtin’s theorization of polyvocality in the novel leads me to suggest, following Gérard Genette, Ken Barris and Ronit Frenkel, that the idea of the palimpsest in South African writings has particular potency for thinking about historical change. I propose that these ideas are skilfully fictionalized and rendered imaginatively accessible in Diane Awerbuck’s Home Remedies (2012), Marcus Low’s Asylum (2017) and Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005).

Dystopian Ecologies: Thinking about South African Ecocriticism through a Comparative Reading of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion and Alettie van den Heever’s Stof [Dust

Summary This article explores the notion of a South African ecocriticism by firstly placing it against the background of the ongoing debates about the relationship between postcolonialism and ecocriticism and secondly by situating it within the context of African ecocriticism. It points out the most important characteristics of South African ecocriticism, focusing on the impact of South Africa’s colonial history on environmental matters, the subsequent entanglement of environmental with social matters as well as the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity. The “dynamism and contingency” (Wylie 2006: 266) typical of South African ecocriticism is further considered by a comparative reading of two recent South African novels that present dystopian views of a future environment, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s English novel Green Lion (2015), which deals with animal extinction, and Alettie van den Heever’s Afrikaans novel Stof [Dust] (2018), which focuses on plant extinction.

An End in Itself: Genre, Apocalypse and the Archive in Deon Meyer’s Fever

What are the affordances of reading apocalyptic fiction under apocalyptic conditions, when a realism without apocalypse hardly seems realistic at all? What does it mean that our attempts to imagine a future beyond capitalism seem tethered to such an apocalyptic event, and what might these attempts tell us about the present – and the past – from which they emerge? While apocalyptic fiction contends to imagine a world beyond capitalism, I argue that it is more effective at exposing the apocalyptic nature of our present. I tether my analysis to a novel as prototypical of the genre as it is exceptional: Fever by the South African crime novelist Deon Meyer. I explore this protean text through a variety of generic frames – as fictional memoir, as Bildungsroman, and as multi-genre hybrid – to consider what the post-apocalyptic genre is and can be. Ultimately, I propose that, by rerouting our readings of post-apocalyptic and other speculative fictions towards what they reveal of our present cultural logics, this literature and our readings of it hold the capacity to escape the confines of anticipatory mourning towards the politically urgent task of recognizing and reckoning with the world of late capitalism and the affective trap of capitalist realism.

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema Jude Akudinobi (bio) Questions of identity and culture prevalent in contemporary African cinema are often mistaken as, essentially, a contest between "tradition" and "modernity." This is perhaps a consequence of attempts to devise a critical paradigm that would "explain" the complexities of contemporary African social experience and cinematic practice. However, the realities of contemporary African experience cannot be productively assessed without the revision or abandonment of the tradition/modernity schema. Interestingly, this schema has gained currency in academic and popular "understandings" of contemporary African cinema. Witness a few examples: for Manthia Diawara, it is the basis of social realist narratives; for Sheila Petty, it is a structuring principle; for Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, it is a conceptual space.1 The restrictive nature of the modernity/tradition schema is clearly illustrated by the assertion that: "In Africa, modernity and tradition seem so incompatible more than anywhere else."2 This statement marks Africa as aberrant and recalcitrant, and is deeply embedded in racist mythologies (in so far as it suggests that there is something intrinsically wrong or somehow problematic about African peoples/cultures). Equally important, the schema promotes the consignment of African institutions to a primordial cultural space and the bifurcation of very complex social experiences/expressions. Labyrinths Despite the developments that have occurred in African arts, popular culture, and cinema recently—cultural syncretism and a diversification of themes, styles, and genres—they must still contend with the fact that "western dichotomies of aesthetics and function, tradition and modernity have not facilitated understanding of indigenous concepts" and "realities."3 [End Page 358] Ideas of "modernity'' in dominant discourse are implicitly synonymous with western civilization. But, one "cannot easily separate modernity and tradition, from some specific tradition and some specific modernity … The modern comes to the traditional society as a particular culture with its own traditions."4 This specificity is especially important, since the structural opposition of the tradition/modernity formulation does not pit one tradition against another, but polarizes (African) tradition against an essentialist notion of modernity. As has been observed by A. E. Afigbo: In the rival mythologies of European imperialism and colonial nationalism, change was one of the many vital innovations which European rule introduced into what is usually described as traditional societies. If imperial apologists were to compile a dictionary of their own, in it the word change, as applied to colonial peoples, would be defined approvingly as progress, a dramatic and beneficial linear transition from a static and unproductive traditional culture to a dynamic and limitless modernism.5 The reigning scenario explicitly assigns "tradition" different roles and meanings in the West and Africa. In the West, "tradition" is endowed with a curatorial function—to the extent that it preserves a coherent, albeit idealized, notion of self and continuity; especially, since the "term tradition belongs to lexical fields that are emotionally charged and evaluative."6 It should, also, be noted that at the most elementary level, the opposite of "modern" is "ancient," not "tradition"; but positing African traditions as opposite of modernity recasts the terms of reference and allows for the surreptitious projection of a narcissistic western(ized) selfimage. As has been noted by Corinne Kratz, "notions of tradition are invariably implicated in the politics of identity, and domains central to representations of tradition bear on those politics."7 Roots The cinematic critique of "modernity" has a literary antecedent in the works of African novelists whose books were instrumental to the collapse of the mystique of colonial authority. In these works, the disruption of colonial authority, and especially its fixed sense of stability, secured a niche for the construction of an unfettered Africanness. These works also raised questions about the position of Africans within the colonial order (since the latter's discourse of progress, ventriloquially, is a discourse of power). Some examples include Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep not Child, Ousmane Sembène's God's Bits of Wood, Ferdinand Oyono's The Old Man and the Medal, and Mongo Beti's The Poor Christ of Bomba. Close parallels to these examples [End Page 359] abound in plays and poems. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Dennis Chukwude...

'The World Called Him a Thug'

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.

Aeromobilities of Student Newcomers in Francophone African Fiction

Abstract In the field of postcolonial literary studies, representations of concrete forms of mobility have not received the critical attention they deserve. This is partly due to the field's reductive understanding of “mobility” as a synonym for migration. In order to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research, this article focuses on representations of aeromobility in the context of Afroeuropean student mobilities in a set of Francophone African novels from the 1980s to the 2010s. My reading of scenes of aeromobility in the text corpus draws attention to the anxious aspects of the air travel of unaccustomed travelers and African newcomers traveling to the former colonial center, and explores the formal functions of representations of aeromobility in terms of narrative structures and tropes.

Aeromobilities of Student Newcomers in Francophone African Fiction

In the field of postcolonial literary studies, representations of concrete forms of mobility have not received the critical attention they deserve. This is partly due to the field’s reductive understanding of “mobility” as a synonym for migration. In order to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research, this article focuses on representations of aeromobility in the context of Afroeuropean student mobilities in a set of Francophone African novels from the 1980s to the 2010s. My reading of scenes of aeromobility in the text corpus draws attention to the anxious aspects of the air travel of unaccustomed travelers and African newcomers traveling to the former colonial center, and explores the formal functions of representations of aeromobility in terms of narrative structures and tropes.

Africa, China, and the Global South Novel: In Koli Jean Bofane’sCongo Inc.

AbstractThe People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) presence in Africa has fundamentally changed globalization patterns. Most scholarship interrogates whether the Chinese presence is either a “new colonialism” or a “win-win” for development by focusing on economic or social scientific factors. In contrast, this article examines China as a trope in Congo Inc. (2014) by In Koli Jean Bofane. Congo Inc. is one of the first African novels to take the Africa-China relationship as central theme, depicting how Congolese actors negotiate the PRC’s presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The article examines the unexpected partnership of a trickster, Isookanga, and a stranded Chinese national, Zhang Xia, analyzing their partnership according to the relationship between time and globalization. The argument uses the concept of the postcolony’s durées to demonstrate how the narrative creates a global South temporality, which differentiates Africa-China patterns of globalization from previous instantiations. These durées include Isookanga’s digital consciousness enabled by a PRC-built cell tower; allusions to Chinese history; and Isookanga and Zhang Xia’s collaboration on Eau Pire Suisse. In sum Congo Inc.’s innovative temporality, embodied by the term mondialiste, signals a shift in type of postcolonial narrative toward the global South novel.