This chapter advances three primary arguments about the politics of corporate regulation in twentieth-century Saudi Arabia. First, that the state’s legislative regulation of company creation was the product of two often-opposing pressures: the private sector’s demand for a domestic regulatory environment that reflects prevailing international norms, and the religious establishment’s reticence to cede their traditional competences. Second, that Ibn Saud’s legislative initiatives in the early 1930s constituted a critical juncture, after which subsequent Saudi kings would promulgate corporate reforms, while the religious establishment would contest their judicial recognition. These tensions pushed judicial institutional development into a pattern of oscillation between unification and separate systems for corporate issues. Third, that the 1990 Gulf War and the contemporaneous liberal and conservative reform movements constitute another somewhat broader critical juncture in Saudi politics. Cross-class movements for greater political influence tangibly shaped corporate regulations, the state’s political institutions, and, consequently, how any future regulations would be formulated.

This chapter introduces the arguments and structure of the book. It surveys how the liberalization of company creation regulations in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia across the first two decades of the twenty-first century defy the predictions of the existing resource curse literature. To explain the political constrains on economic liberalization in resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes, the chapter introduces the rent-conditional reform theory. It also details the shortcomings of earlier quantitative studies of economic regulation and liberalization in contexts of resource wealth and outlines the methodological innovations of this book.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Non-normative sexual and gender identities are not new to Africa, but their representation in literary texts has grown significantly over the past two decades, establishing queer literature as a burgeoning genre. This chapter focuses on what defines “queer” in African literature and examines its key features. It compares literary production from different regions of the continent, highlighting both continuities and diversity in the representation of queerness. Particular attention is given to Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions to consider the similarities and divergences in representations of queerness across these linguistic and cultural contexts. These literary analyses are interwoven with scholarly debates, showing how literature and academic discourse on African queerness inform and influence one another. Drawing on Keguro Macharia’s concept of “frottage,” the chapter examines how interactions between African and queer identities can evoke both generative and conflictual affects. The chapter ultimately interrogates the politics of queer representation in literature, particularly in queerphobic contexts in Africa. In so doing, the chapter explores how literature not only makes queerness visible but also negotiates difference and nonconformity.

Experimental writing challenges familiar ways of the representation of reality through a literary text. This chapter interrogates the notion of experimental writing and considers its place among African literary genres. The chapter then zooms in on experimental writing in African languages, with a case study of two contemporary Swahili writers, Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) and William Mkufya (1953–). Both writers have interrogated in their writing the nature of African postcolonial reality and considered possibilities of altering that reality, through reparation and reconstruction, but also through a full-fledged recasting and redefinition of the intellectual frameworks that support contemporary African life. Both authors use Swahili, but they load language and style with a multitude of new meanings. In effect, language becomes an abstract and flexible structure capable of thorough transformation to conceive of and express a radically new reality. The same applies to the adoption and adaptation of literary genres. Genres lose their typical literary and ideological determinations. The experimental writing of these authors challenges literary realism in African literature and creates a “novel genre” to articulate texts of a futurist and truly emancipatory African philosophy.

In the striking opening sentence of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the Magistrate’s attention is drawn to the dark sunglasses worn by his sinister military visitor, Colonel Joll: ‘I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire’.1 The Magistrate cannot see Joll’s eyes hidden behind the reflective glasses, pointing here, at the outset, to a larger problem of optical non-reciprocity in Coetzee’s third novel. The opening sentence’s problematisation of the pronomial ‘I’, which simultaneously also points to his unseeing eye, needs to be read in conjunction with the Magistrate’s enigmatic remark at the ending of the novel: ‘There is something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it’ (155).

This chapter explores the dynamic nature of African online creative writing, focusing on short digital forms that include flash fiction, social media poetry, and short stories. These forms – characterized by brevity, accessibility, and experimentation – challenge traditional literary conventions; they serve as platforms for diverse voices that extend the nature and identity of African literature. The chapter also traces the evolution of scholarship on African online creative writing, highlighting debates on creativity, authenticity, and the potential of new media technology. Further, the chapter identifies platforms that maintain different editorial standards while catering to various audiences. It includes a discussion of the influence of oral tradition, the use of African and non-African languages, the role of social media, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on literary events and publishing. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the democratization of African creative expression through digital platforms that include Jalada, ebonystory, and Flash Fiction Ghana, while acknowledging challenges posed by internet access, resources, and infrastructure. By undertaking an overview of this rapidly evolving genre, this chapter highlights the modes through which African online creative writing is shaping the future of African literature.

This chapter characterizes the evolution and politicization of corporate regulation in Nigeria and crafts a theory of professional interest group politics in Nigeria. The chapter outlines how corporate regulation in Nigeria was politicized during the era of Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program. In particular, the drafting process of the Companies Decree of 1990 provided a previously unparalleled opportunity for independent manufacturing, services, professional, and labor organizations to contest the revision of the most fundamental provisions of Nigerian corporate law. Informed by this history, the chapter advances a novel theory of professional interest groups in Nigerian politics, which are industry-based organizations that seek to advance their policy objectives at the federal level. Drawing their membership from across traditional regional, ethnic, and class boundaries, they are internally hierarchical and their less-prominent members also benefit from the achievement of shared regulatory objectives. Nigerian professional interest groups exercise a tangible influence over federal policy and its implementation.

This chapter serves as an introduction to African Literature in Transition. The edited volume is intended to function as a compendium of histories of selected genres that have emerged in the written literature and other verbal arts of the African continent from at least the beginning of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. The introduction analyzes the role of genre as organizing principle for African literary history writ large both in the popular arts and in high literary forms. The primary argument of the chapter is that understanding African literary histories is not simply a matter of creating a record of what has been written and performed, but also a matter of surveying how and why particular types of African-authored texts have become more or less visible at different points in time through an examination of the role of genres. To advance this argument, the introduction focuses on the sub-categories of genre in African literature rather than the broad generic classifications of African literature such as the African novel, African poetry, or African drama. Equally, the chapter juxtaposes genres that are read mainly locally with those that are read both locally and outside Africa.

This chapter systematizes the comparison of the Nigerian and Saudi cases to offer four primary insights about the past and future trajectories of economic liberalization in resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes. First, at the level of political actors, the Nigerian organized private sector appears dynamic and competitive in its pursuit of procedural rents when compared to the ossified Saudi Chambers of Commerce. Second, at an historical level, the Saudi and Nigerian histories of corporate law reform share a common experience of initial foreign importation, before a process of local tailoring and, eventually, their liberalization becoming rent-conditional. Third, at a theoretical level, the diverse causal processes evidenced within the two cases illustrates the potential for greater causal processes within the flexible rent-conditional reform (RCR) framework. Fourth, considering the potential global transition to a lower-carbon economy, the application of the RCR theory suggests diverging future potentials of liberalization in high- and low-cost oil producers, and potential newfound relevance for non-fuel mineral producers.