ENGL 4273 X2

Studies in Postcolonial Literature
Dr. Kerry Vincent

Departures and Returns: the Transnational Imagination in African Literature

If cosmopolitanism is often associated broadly with “world citizenship,” then Afropolitanism more specifically is a celebration of cultural hybridity, a way of being African in the world. A term first coined by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu in 2005 to describe the recent generation of young, multilingual, well-educated Africans who have taken up residence in global urban centers, Afropolitanism was reconfigured by the postcolonial theorist Achilles Mbembe to describe “a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity—which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world.” More recently, however, the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina (and others) has distanced himself from the phenomenon, critiquing its association with an impetuous global consumer culture.

The unstable, contested nature of this term will be the launching point for a discussion of the writings of a number of Afropolitan authors who are making their mark in the “world republic of letters.” We will pay attention to issues around uprootedness, mobility, and migrant identity, but also ask questions about audience, production, and reception. Do some of these writers reproduce colonial discourse by peddling the exoticism of indigenous cultures to the metropole?  How committed do they remain to local movements of national resistance? Where can they be placed within debates over the definition of African literature? Has the global circulation of literature influenced the subject and shape of new African writing? Is the term “postcolonial” still appropriate, or should we be thinking or designations like world literature or global Anglophone literature? Are the texts addressed to a European and North American readership, or African readers? To what extent have literary prizes, such as the Caine Prize and the Orange Prize—both founded in the UK—dictated form and content? As a baseline for comparison and context, we will first briefly track the evolution of African literature from its nationalist beginnings to a growing post-independence pessimism.