An enduring sense of deep historical time continues to anchor and guide writing by African novelists, no less so as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. One of the most powerful of such fictions lately is the debut novel by South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni, whose The Broken River Tent plays out as a psychic drama in which Maqoma, the nineteenth-century Xhosa chief who fought the British as they tried to settle the Cape Colony, is in dialogue with Phila, a young South African negotiating the disappointments of his country after the demise of apartheid. Ntabeni is in touch, imaginatively, with a long line of historical novelists which begins with such iconic figures as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, who in the early twentieth century revisited historical episodes of 100 years previously. While The Broken River Tent follows Chinua Achebe’s example in taking some reference points from European modernism, it does so without interpreting the colonial encounter through the paradigm of classical tragedy. Instead, following a recent revival of the militancy of South Africa’s Black Consciousness era, Ntabeni’s invocation of Maqoma implies a renewed emphasis on anti-(neo)colonial vigilance.

This chapter explores the significance of Lagos as a repository of memory for Nigerian writers. It brings works of contemporary writers such as Sefi Atta and Teju Cole in conversation with older representations of Lagos. While the more recent novels destabilize earlier binaries, they institute other dualities through their relationship to time. The chapter pays attention to how versions of Lagos – past and present – are contrasted to make the cityscape a template for measuring temporal effects. Crucially, the nation-state is the point of reference and the ultimate objective of progress. Lagos is no longer measured against the village but situated in transnational competition with European and American cities where Nigerians commute in person or imaginatively. Through a comparative and diachronic reading, the chapter offers an archive of Lagos representation while arguing that the authorial emphasis on national time as homogeneous often rests on a corresponding de-emphasis of the subaltern times signaled by narrative polyphony.

The chapter considers anti-colonial liberation to be a generative archive for African literary imaginaries, by zoning in on literary engagements with anti-colonial liberation struggles across Africa. The chapter suggests that literary texts and liberation struggles co-constitute each other in an ongoing dialogue on the meanings of freedom for post/colonial African societies. Using examples from different genres and regions, this chapter tracks the ebb and flow of key perspectives in this dialogue; and the role this archive has played in African literary thought, as a dynamic imaginative frame that poses important questions. The chapter suggests that literary engagements with anti-colonial liberation movements allow us to track shifting conceptualizations of freedom, from the optimistic cultural nationalism of the anti-colonial struggles, to the brief euphoria of flag independence, to the disillusionment that follows the betrayal of liberation struggle ideals. Secondly, the chapter reveals how these literary reflections on liberation struggles wrestle with the tensions between freedom as the pursuit of full humanity and philosophical questions posed by violence as a tool for liberation. Lastly, the chapter examines questions of memory, representation, contradictions, and the silences that haunt anti-colonial liberation movements.

This chapter explores how capitalism has shaped US global power, and how US foreign policy has shaped the trajectory of US capitalism. The approach departs from more well-examined questions, such as quantifying how much capitalist motivations dictated foreign policy decisions, or interrogating whether US actions were determined by geopolitical calculations of realpolitik, versus ideological commitments to democracy, versus ambitions of expanding market share. Rather, beginning with an observation of the inextricability of the development of capitalism and the US as a nation, this chapter examines in what ways economic motivations, structures, and beliefs have appeared in US diplomacy; how centering capitalism shifts the definitions we have of terms like “US foreign relations” and “US global power”; and how this framework troubles concepts we might otherwise have left unexamined. This approach poses new methodological challenges: determining what scale(s) are most useful for studying capitalism; the problem of accessing private corporate archives; how to consider the role of the state in a study that places capitalism at its core; expanding the roster of actors in the history of US foreign relations; and considering how a focus on business and labor changes our understanding of the connections between US power abroad and at home.

This chapter examines the process of military mobilization in South Carolina during the initial months of the war. It probes what motivated men to volunteer for military service at this time and gives sustained consideration to flag presentations to volunteer units, public occasions that have been insufficiently appreciated by historians as important sites for the construction of Confederate nationalism at the local level. White women proved integral to the ritual and rhetoric surrounding these presentations, and so their role in the wider process and culture of mobilization is also analyzed. The final part of the chapter turns its attention to Federal forces establishing a vital foothold on South Carolina’s coast in late 1861 and, in particular, considers its consequences for the interior sections of the state. Federal success on the coast meant that the war had come a lot closer to home for those in the upcountry and this, when coupled with a growing realization that victory was likely to entail considerable sacrifice in terms of both blood and treasure, sowed the seeds for a more ardent national vision to emerge among some South Carolinians.

This chapter takes a dual approach to the subject of Confederate conscription. Its first half analyzes the policy from a political and intellectual perspective, positing that the expansion and tightening of conscription across the war reveals how an ardent strain of Confederate nationalism came to inform both policy and fundamental ideas about what it meant to be a citizen. As more and more men were called upon to enter southern armies and fight against an enemy that was increasingly willing to lay the hard hand of war upon the South, military service came to be interpreted as a fundamental obligation for able-bodied white men. The second half provides a more grassroots account of how conscription and exemption worked in the South Carolina upcountry. It argues that, while the exemption process was unquestionably influenced by class privilege as wealthy and well-connected South Carolinians could use their financial and social capital to evade military service in ways that their poorer neighbors simply could not, this did not cause a widespread rejection of the Confederacy.

Scholars such as Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui, and V. Y. Mudimbe have pointed out that the idea of Africa was designed to legitimize Western imperialism. This raises the question as to whether or not this idea can metamorphose into a liberating concept. Nevertheless, between the 1950s and 1980s, numerous creative writers almost invariably wrote poems, plays, and novels that focused on the identities of their various peoples, while taking the African identity as a given in their formal academic ruminations contained in their essays. Consequently, this chapter explores the extent to which the portrayals of the cultural identities of the peoples of Africa in numerous literary works by creative writers from the continent, and the African identity taken for granted in the bulk of the theoretical works by the same authors, point to a discrepancy in their presentations of the nature of postcolonial reconstruction. The thesis of the chapter is that foregrounding the names of the continent’s various peoples in scholarship would acknowledge their rich and highly diverse cultures, thereby significantly mitigating baseless continent-wide generalizations. We can then still talk of “African literature,” “African philosophy,” and “African history,” among others, but in a highly circumscribed manner.

Drawing from the economic, political, and security records of the Kế Bào Coal Company – one of the first two large-scale French coal mining companies established in Tonkin – this chapter tracks the rise and fall of the company and offers a labor, social, and racial history of the many pioneers of the coal frontier, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese migrant coal mine workers, the Vietnamese convicts, and the French personnel. By situating the history of large-scale coal mining in Kế Bào within the regional context of the Sino-Vietnamese borderland and the global coolie trade of the nineteenth century, this chapter illustrates the risks and precarities of coal mining along a remote maritime coal frontier in the early days of French colonialism in Tonkin. Specifically, it highlights the perils of financial miscalculation, labor mismanagement, overoptimistic and incomplete geological surveys, and the environmental and ecological challenges of extracting coal in a tropical landscape unfamiliar to Europeans, all of which contributed to the company’s downfall.

This chapter explores the transformations of Christianity in African novels. While it is clear from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that Africans believed in a supreme God before the intervention of missionaries, most postcolonial novels describe the role played by the advent of the “new” God in the consolidation of colonialism. The collusion between church, capitalism, and colonial administration is well illustrated by several authors from different linguistic backgrounds. However, with the rise of theologies of liberation, novelists like V. Y. Mudimbe and Pius Ngandu Nkashama have revisited the role and function of the church in postcolonial settings. They put God’s name to task in order to challenge the inconsistencies and disillusionments born out of independence. With the proliferation of Pentecostal churches, God has remained a key plot driver in postcolonial narratives. From domination to liberation, the African religious and spiritual landscape has shifted significantly over the decades. This chapter uses postcolonial scholarship to investigate the ways in which the name of God has shaped narratives in various geographies of the African continent. From colonial priests to liberation leaders, the face of missionaries is totally transformed in African novels.