“Yes, but . . .” : On Reforming African Literary Scholarship

1 See Fanon, Frantz, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 119–165 .

2 As a noun, to designate peoples who belong to the continent or to specific regions of the continent; as a modifier, to describe a consciousness of collective, racially distinctive, historical legacies, cultural norms and values, and metaphysical beliefs.

3 Olaniyan, Tejumola, “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016): 387 .

4 Echeruo, Michael J. C., “The Alpha Discourse: Theorizing ‘We’ in Michel Foucault and Edward Said,” The Savannah Review 1 (November 2012): 51–80 .

5 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, ed. Francis Abiola Irele (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).

6 Brown, Nicholas, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

7 Nordtveit, Bjorn Harald, “Towards Post-Globalisation? On the Hegemony of Western Education and Development Discourses,” Globalisation, Societies and Education 8.3 (September 2010): 321–337 . Nordtveit uses the post-global to designate “a characteristic of a state of the world that will occur when and where the movement of integration of economies has been completed, and when the world is more or less unified in one capitalist discourse” and “to signify a critical engagement with such hypothetical state of the world, questioning the legacies of the globalization movement and policies . . . I refer to post-globalisation as the state of completed globalization, and of the critical engagement with such state of affairs” (323).

8 Roy, Arundhati, Public Power in the Age of Empire (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004).

9 Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

10 Cazdyn, Eric and Szeman, Imre, After Globalization (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

11 Amuta, Chidi, The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism (London: Zed Books, 1989).

12 Kalliney, Peter J., “East African Literature and the Politics of Global Reading,” Literature and Globalization, eds. Liam Connell and Nicky Marshs (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 298–314 .

13 Amer, Sahar and Doyle, Laura, “Introduction: Reframing Postcolonial and Global Studies in the Longer Durée ,” PMLA 130.2 (March 2015): 331–335 .

14 Doyle, Laura, “Inter-Imperiality and Literature in the Longer Durée ,” PMLA 130.2 (March 2015): 336–347 .

15 Lienau, Annette Damayanti, “Reframing Vernacular Culture on Arabic Fault Lines: Bamba, Senghor, and Sembene’s Translingual Legacies in French West Africa,” PMLA 130.2 (March 2015): 419–429 .

16 In addition to reconciling “postcolonial literature” with “world literature,” Ngũgĩ envisages an emergent “world literature” that would “preserve the particularity of a national culture and the intimate relationship between language and literature, while also catering to the global reach and appeal” (57). Against this proposition, it is worth asking if anything like “a national culture” currently exists as anything but a heuristic device for recuperating a concept now rendered threadbare by globalization, the very system that also deploys nationalism as an ideological instrument for encouraging us to reconcile ourselves to the uneven distribution of benefits accruing from capitalism (Cazdyn and Szeman 228).

17 Vuković, Katarina Peović, “Electronic Literature and Modes of Production: Art in the Era of Digital and Digital-Network Paradigm,” New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014), 27–41 .

Editor’s note: This Forum is a collection of responses to Tejumola Olaniyan’s essay “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense”, published in Volume 3, Issue 3. Olaniyan has been given the opportunity of providing a brief reaction to his interlocutors.