In the opening pages of The African Novel of Ideas, Jeanne-Marie Jackson muses on the life of the Fante intellectual David Eyiku Awotwi: a life filled with cosmopolitan affiliations, travel, political activism, social engagement, and responsibilities—but also with hours of solitary study and meditative walks around the streets of Accra. The first part of this equation—the communal commitments—is the stock-in-trade of studies of African writing. Yet it is all too easy when discussing African figures, Jackson suggests, to forget the second part of the equation: the commitment to individuality and the private life of the mind. The African Novel of Ideas can be considered an extended elaboration of this insight. Its central claim goes something like this. Contemporary debates on African literature view it as either (I schematize here): (1) a concrete rebuke to the universalizing pretensions of the West (postcolonial studies); (2) an illustration of the “combined and uneven development” engendered by global capital (world systems theory); or (3) a repository of experience and story (much contemporary African studies). These discourses all have in common an anti-Enlightenment, anti-universalist, and, crucially, an anti-liberal bias. This has led us to dismiss a crucial vein of overtly philosophical engagement that runs through the African novel from at least the early twentieth century and into the present. In attending to this vein, Jackson aims to give a lay of the literary land in which African literature appears not as the other of the Western Logos but rather as a sophisticated set of negotiations in which Enlightenment rationality is debated, extended, and remade.The title The African Novel of Ideas is somewhat misleading, and one suspects Jackson chose it for its pith rather than its accuracy. The novels dealt with here are not novels of ideas, at least not in the sense of being a drama of ideas dialogically played out within a dense novelistic framework. What Jackson examines are rather novels that grapple with the vexed place of the “philosophical individual” (and by extension philosophical reason as such) within an anticolonial imaginary that views the liberal individual as complicit with imperial violence. The African novel of ideas does not so much dramatize ideas, in the vein of the European novel of ideas, as it positions the act of doing philosophy within the fraught context of anticolonial struggle. One could perhaps call them “novels of sober intellection,” since Jackson intends by ideas a very specific form of thinking: private, measured, cautious, and dispassionate.This delimitation of philosophy, as I will suggest towards the end of this review, in some ways works against the capacious vision of African literature that Jackson sketches in her study. But there is no doubt that Jackson’s canvas is broad and revelatory, avoiding the expected heavyweights (Achebe, Coetzee, Adichie) while still surveying a full century’s worth of literature and philosophy, stretching from Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911) to Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014). The broad-strokes picture is one in which a figure of the philosophical individual emerges as a beleaguered but redoubtable force in the early twentieth century (the first two chapters of the study), only to be squeezed out in the latter part of the century as independent African nations and their literatures are swept up in either nationalist or globalist currents (the second two chapters). The first two chapters chronicle the emergence of an idea of the solitary, deliberative African intellectual in West Africa (focusing on the Fante politician and novelist Casely Hayford) and Southern Africa (focusing primarily on the Zimbabwean novelist and philosopher Stanlake Samkange). Much of the work of these chapters lies in prizing these complex figures out from under their straw-man renditions, in which they are dupes of imperialism, and showing the full sophistication and political heft of their thought. Key to the thinking of both men is a striving toward some form of what Jackson terms “disembedded conceptuality” (60), in which particular cultural knowledge can be mobilized within reasoned debate but is not merely the “end-goal of erudition” (59). At one level, this enables a powerful mode of decolonial praxis: as Jackson shrewdly notes, liberalism’s oft-derided measuredness and reason is turned into a rebuke to the irrational and passion-filled world of colonialism. At another level, perhaps the more important one for Jackson, their thinking constitutes a form of “conceptual enfranchisement” (43), in which African thought appears as a tough-minded interlocutor of Western reason, rather than its other. A mode of comparatism is thus fostered in which Africa engages with the world on equal terms.The second half of Jackson’s study shifts gears to address the pressure placed on the philosophical individual as Africa is increasingly caught up in global economic and cultural networks. In this global space, the social legibility of the African subject is increasingly a question of representing a certain brand of Africanness, be it worldly Afropolitanism or a hyper-localism of personal experience and story. The philosophical individual interested in making universalizable claims, previously under attack by fiercer and more radical forms of anticolonialism, is now in danger of being simply swallowed up in a post-liberal world order. At the heart of this section is a masterful reading of Jennifer Nansubugu Makumbi’s Kintu, a novel that traces the persistence of a family curse from the precolonial era to the present-day nation of Uganda. With its readerly invitations to both rational and nonrational explanatory frameworks for this curse, the novel explores the philosophical question of “how best to make meaning from one’s relation to events” (112). Jackson suggests that, far from endorsing the idea of an “Africanstein” (the idea of Africa as an amalgamation of disparate global and local parts, advanced in Namwali Serpell’s influential reading of the novel), Kintu in fact mounts a powerful critique of globality, showing how it engenders forms of blindness to the local. In its place, the novel articulates an idea of a flexible, locally embedded reason whose legitimacy is derived from place and local responsiveness.I will turn to Jackson’s final chapter shortly, but first some comments. The terms philosophy and philosophical are central to this study, and it is worth pointing out that they are by no means self-evident or neutral signifiers. By philosophy, Jackson means something very particular: a specifically Kantian tradition of thinking that prizes common sense, dispassionate analysis, and clarity. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are not to be found here, and certainly not Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, or Spivak. (Fanon makes occasional appearances, but as a prickly figure not always to be trusted.) At several junctures, Jackson distinguishes philosophy from “critical theory,” by which she means discourses suspicious of the Enlightenment inheritance. This finds its way into her methodology, which is to place African novels in conversation with African philosophers—Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Emmanuel Eze, among others—working broadly within the universalist, analytic tradition of contemporary Anglophone philosophy. “African philosophy,” in this presentation, is engaged not in a repudiation of Western thought or a poststructuralist skepticism regarding the primacy of reason, but in an extension or reworking of reason—that is, in the search for a true universalism rather than the dispelling of a false one.Now, there are clearly political implications to Jackson’s tough-minded defense of what has come to be regarded in much of the academic humanities as an exhausted and ideologically suspect tradition. Jackson handles these politics with muscular nuance, making it clear that she has no interest in resuscitating liberalism as such, but rather in rescuing from it key elements of Enlightenment thought: reason, rationality, the autonomous individual. As Jackson makes clear throughout, to valorize these Enlightenment values is not to accede to the self-serving myths of Western coloniality, but rather to call the West to account, to insist on a fuller and better Enlightenment. (Jackson here implicitly places herself on the Habermas side of the Adorno-Habermas debate: Enlightenment as unfinished project rather than catastrophe.) Nevertheless, I find myself wondering at the nature of the relationship between the African individual and Enlightenment philosophy. Is the affinity a natural one, as Jackson seems to suggest, emerging self-evidently as the emancipatory territory of the true anti-colonialist? Or is it rather, as I suspect, simply the product of a specific historical conjunction, that of an anglophone African intelligentsia trained in British educational institutions? In other words, is Enlightenment philosophy simply one possible tool to be used in anticolonial struggle? If one were, for example, to take a snapshot of francophone Africa, a somewhat different picture might emerge, in which the major African thinkers—Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Mudimbe, Mbembe—while similarly conjoining the practice of philosophy with the politics of decolonialism, operate within a very different Continental tradition. This is by no means to dismiss the philosophers (or the philosophy) Jackson discusses but simply to note that they drew on the resources they encountered. My sense, in other words, is that Jackson often overplays the universalizing hand of Enlightenment philosophy. In her bullish inversion of a dominant anti-Enlightenment epistemic mode, in which non-fungible experience and philosophical anti-humanism are valorized, Jackson risks falling into an old trap: that of casting rationality as not simply philosophically or politically universalizable but as intrinsically virtuous. Indeed, Jackson’s readings are accompanied by a lexicon of moderation in which “dispassion,” “restraint,” “self-cultivation,” and “analytic clarity” are prized over and against the “strident vituperation” and “racial metaphysics” of hegemonic decolonial discourse. Here the book occasionally veers, rhetorically, into the very territory from which it so convincingly salvages its subjects politically: that of the évolué, the “civilized” African.A second difficulty of Jackson’s vision lies in what one could call its intellectual drama. Reason and autonomous selfhood may have many virtues, but electricity and excitement are not among them. This is well illustrated in the final chapter of the study, on the eclipse of philosophical reason in the contemporary African novel. One cannot miss, in the chapter’s thrilling discussion of Dostoevsky’s Demons as an intertext to contemporary African novels of “philosophical suicide,” that, in stark contrast to the thinkers Jackson has been discussing, Dostoevsky’s characters enunciate ideas that are at the limits of what it is historically possible to think: they are extremists and radicals whose ideas possess a world-changing and at the same time world-destroying potential (Jackson memorably observes that in Dostoevsky, ideas are if anything too powerful). By contrast, in the novels of the Zimbabwean Tendai Huchu and the South Africans Imraan Coovadia and Masande Ntshanga, ideas are feeble, flickering in and out of narrative view, solitary refuges from “a grotesquely disjointed and disorienting web of global systems” (180). Jackson ascribes this to an environment hostile to individual deliberation, which is certainly true, in part. But I cannot help feeling that it is also partly ascribable to the ideas themselves, which are compelling but bedeviled by a lack of dramatic intensity. There is a certain drama in the failure of ideas to overcome the indifference of the age (the trope of intellectual suicide is a captivating one), but it is not the same drama as the drama of ideas as such.This is a critique one could level, in differing degrees, at the work of many of the writers in this study. Jackson’s study is torn between the desire to inject a Dostoyevskian dramatic intensity into the ideas she presents and a lingering sense that the real drama of the story she tells resides not in the ideas themselves—which are robust and vigorous but not electrifying—but in the metanarrative about ideas. To my mind, it is the latter that wins out. The contentious, fractious relationship between philosophy and the African novel is a consistent and dramatically engaging through-line of Jackson’s study. Philosophical ideas find difficult purchase in the fictions Jackson discusses, often bracketed off from the rest of the narrative, and African writers serious about philosophical thinking restlessly shift genre between novelistic fiction and philosophy (Samkange ultimately finds the novel useless and abandons it for philosophy). One reason for this is that philosophy, at least the kind of philosophy that interests Jackson, demands a level of self-abstraction—an emptying of the self of individual experience—antagonistic to both the narrative demands of the novel form, which pulls toward the kind of experiential miasma that is Jackson’s nemesis, and the political demands of the twentieth-century African nation. Jackson, I think, acknowledges this neutering of the idea when she concludes the study with an appeal to the “quality of mind” that makes the world “feel worth saving” (189)—but this is a minimal baseline, surely, when taken in relation to the potentially world-shaking power that ideas might possess.I present these thoughts as rejoinders rather than criticisms. The African Novel of Ideas is, all in all, a very impressive achievement whose canon-forming ambitions will, I suspect, be largely vindicated. Jackson is a muscular, masterful critic who strikes many blows, and strikes them with pinpoint accuracy. She puts her argument forth in a lucid and polemical fashion that dispatches with many of the regnant orthodoxies of African studies, as well as a number of sanctified figures in the current pantheon of African literature (Chimamanda Adichie, with her highly consumable presentation of African thought, does not fare well). In their place, she offers a vision of African literature that is indisputably worthwhile and challenging. Her book should open important debates within African studies, at the very least asking critics to take more seriously an alternate canon of African writing and thinking that does not neatly fit the somewhat constricted purview of present debates. It should also, just as importantly, offer a serious counterpoint to some of the categories—identity, experience, feeling—by which moral and intellectual capital is currently accrued in the critical discourse on Africa.