My Account. Remember to clear the cache and close the browser window. Search For:. Advanced Search. Africa writes back to self metafiction, gender, sexuality. Mwangi, Evan. Publication Information:. Physical Description:. Subject Term:. African fiction English -- History and criticism. Self in literature. Self-perception in literature. Sex role in literature. Citing articles via Web Of Science 5.
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Granted, Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, whose modernist novels are haunted by the figure of the artist, has Solo, his fictional translator aspiring to be an artist in Why Are We So Blest? Outside that, all is useless , I argue here that contemporary African literature is primarily neither a writing back to Europe nor an endorsement of EuroAmerican neocolonialism.
It is first and foremost about self-perception. Despite my skepticism toward postcolonial studies as practiced in Western institutions, this book is not a writing back to postcolonial theory.
The theory has received energetic critique from within its own ranks, although it appears never in a hurry to adopt its own recommendations. But particularly instructive at the outset is Simon Gikandis observation in Globalization and the Claims of Postcolonialism , that in the era of increased integration of economies and unabated cultural exchanges around the world, analyses of literature in English studies can easily be misapplied to extend Western nationalism to formally colonized regions while invoking the dissolution of African nation-states. Like Revathi Krishnaswamy in Mythologies of Migrancy , Gikandi critiques the new focus on cultural production by the relatively comfortable migr native informants in the West at the expense of the brutal material conditions in the postcolonial nations.
A study of locally produced texts, alongside the migr literature, would help us apprehend the multiple sites of identity formations in Africa. Given the predominant notion that African literature is about writing back to the European canon, my proposal that African arts are primarily writing back to themselves might give the impression that this book is a subversion or parody of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffins well-argued book The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures It is not.
Rather, I am extending the ideas in Ashcroft and colleagues authoritative and seminal analysis in a direction they have indicated, especially in their discussion of how we can rethink postcolonial studies to pay more attention to local texts and contexts. I am particularly attracted to their prognosis toward the end of their book to the effect that the future of postcolonial studies resides in the consideration of local.
Noting the shortcomings of postcolonial studies and charting the way forward, they underscore that as the field has developed over the last decade or so, it becomes clearer that perhaps postcolonial theory needs to be further grounded in specific analyses of the effects of large movements and ideologies on particular localities , It is in this spirit that I examine local African texts in English and indigenous languages.
All Rights Reserved. Its combination of reading established African writers alongside more locally known authors provides an uncommon insight into East African literature, making it good reading for scholars wishing to broaden their horizons on various aspects of contemporary African literature. Said further warns us that not all antihegemonic narratives are of equal value as literary texts. The novels engage in a politics that is more scathing in its attack on wayward Africans than on the imperial West. The graduate school further offered me forums in which to discuss this work and to receive commentary from faculty, students, and the general public. Simple in execution, No! The Nationalist Canon and Precolonial Art in the s and s As Nigerian critic Emmanuel Obiechina notes in Cultural Nationalism in Modern African Creative Literature , it is expected of any literature emerging from a colonial situation to be nativist.
In chapter 8 of this book, I critique the usage of the expression writing back in postcolonial studies. Suffice it to say here that the express, as introduced to academic literary criticism by Ashcroft and colleagues, acquires different meanings in a practical examination of postcolonial texts.
These include intertextuality between imperial texts and art from formerly colonized regions, the use of English in ways that deviate from Standard English, and the reclamation of subjectivity for the formerly colonized people through a celebration of their liberation struggles. My criticisms of postcolonial theory should not be seen as a rejection of its valuable contribution to the explanation of African literature, especially its critique of Eurocentrism and other European ontological traditions that have powered colonial and neocolonial domination of Africa.
I am trying to avoid the Western ethics of reading that privileges non-Western literatures in order to give priority to the very European cultures that produced that ethics. I use and extend postcolonial theory to argue that contemporary African novelists resort to self-reflexive devices to signify a state of being in postcolonial African societies rather than to retaliate against, parody, or negate Western discourses. To examine African literature outside of the writing back to Europe paradigm is to appreciate the borrowings and contestations among local texts and to attend to the contradiction raised by Arif Dirlik in The Postcolonial Aura, that relations in postcolonial literature are seen as uniformly between the postcolonial and the First World, never, to my knowledge, between one postcolonial intellectual and another , , emphases in original.
Following Dirlik, I see the need to study not only the contestations between writers in Africa but the internal heteroglossia within individual texts, where self-mimicry and self-critique are figured through bricolage and self-conscious literary forms that help the narrative undermine notions of a stable unitary self without fetishizing fragmentation and chaos.
My main objective in considering contemporary African novels is not only to rethink the dominant paradigm of writing back to the West but also to examine the emergent issues that these novels present. I demonstrate that the writing back to the colonial center paradigm is undermined by the novels preoccupation with self-interrogation and by their prioritization of themes other than the relations between the colonizer and the colonized. What follows in these chapters, then, is an examination of the treatment of gender and sexuality in texts that deploy metafiction as a strategy of narration and self-representation.
While reading the role colonialism plays in African self-fashioning, this book primarily focuses on the use of self-reflexive devices in texts seeking to bring up for public debate issues that are considered taboo or not worthy of serious discussion. The stylistic and thematic inward-looking orientation of the novels is not meant to be taken as a reflection of an Africa that is insulated from the rest of the worldthe kind of community Karl Marx controversially described as characterizing non-European modes of production prior to colonialism.
Even individual texts written in marginalized African languages underline the desire of African societies to reach out to the rest of the world. But these novels reject the undercurrents in postcolonial theory that suggest that European literature is the proper literature the father figure to which African literature writes back. Expanding Fredric Jamesons caveat in The Political Unconscious , that some of the novels read today as realist were not written to fit modern definitions of the term, our discussion of self-reflexive narratives is not limited to texts consciously written to fit into the concept of metafiction as it is used in the current theorizing of literature.
Although metafiction is associated with nonrealist, postmodern aesthetics, some of the novels I discuss here are on the whole realist and modernist; they use metafiction in certain moments of their narration, sometimes to enhance their realism in a way that renders indeterminate the borderline between metafiction and realism. In responding to such novels, I use a mode of reading indirectly allusive to Roland Barthess rereading of Balzacs Sarrasinean active and a constitutive aesthetic engagement in which the reader uncovers the divisive and multiple layers behind the unitary and centered codes of a realist classic.
Defining Metafiction in African Contexts In one of his readings of the experimental Kiswahili novels of the s, Zanzibari novelist and critic Said A. Khamis strategically avoids using the term metafiction because, as he suggests in the essay, the postrealist fiction in African languages derives from indigenous oral literature rather than from Western postmodern aesthetics.
Khamis is articulating a position held by several postcolonial theorists. Mohamed , Khamis suggests that African postrealism is an independent genre developed from. However, it is not lost on the keen reader of his analysis that, although not fully acknowledged, the Western theorization of metafiction forms an important palimpsest in Khamiss readings of Kiswahili novels, including the commentaries on his own writing.
For example, in Fabulation and Politics of the 90s in Kezilahabis Novel Nagona, Khamis describes that novel in terms that echo Patricia Waughs definition of metafiction as a type of fiction that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its own status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality Khamis , Without dismissing the applicability of Western concepts, theorists are reluctant to adopt critical terms wholesale to explain African phenomena.
It is therefore crucial to define the term metafiction in relation to postmodernism and African literature, not only because postmodernism has a vexed relationship to indigenous African literature but also because of the various shades of meanings the term metafiction takes in different contexts. Metafiction in African literature is situated, interlinked with similar practices across the globe but entailing unique disruptions of Western postmodernisms.
It gestures to its own indigenous specific location, even when it is linked to global metafictional productions. Although seen as an exclusively Western, postmodern term, metafiction is what in Kiswahili language would be called bunilizipiku imaginative creation that extends beyond the conventions of fiction, fiction beyond fiction, fiction that outdoes fiction in its fictionality. When the G ku yu culture talks about ngano cia magegania mind-blowing stories, out-of-this-world narratives to describe novels such as Ngu g wa Thiongos Mu rogi wa Kagogo Wizard of the Crow , the language is referring to the same phenomenon of literature that challenges the conventions of realism by drawing attention to its fictional status.
Therefore, in an African context, I use the term metafiction to describe that form of African literature that is self-conscious, self-reflexive, and self-referential. Larry McCaffery uses the term to refer to that type of fiction which either directly examines its own construction as it proceeds or which comments or speculates about the forms and language of previous fictions or fiction that seeks to examine how all fictional systems operate, their methodology, the sources of their appeal, and the dangers of their being dogmatized , emphasis in original.
I extend this definition to consider local conventions of self-reflexivity and the specific political and social nuances that moments of self-reflexivity generate.
Metafictional moments in a narrative are those where the text displays an awareness of its own textuality as an artistic creation; metafictional literature advertises itself as art and problematizes its relationship with the reality it purports to represent through language.