Book contents
- African Literature in Transition
- African Literature in Transition
- African Literature in Transition
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Sources
- Chapter 1 The Colonial Archive
- Chapter 2 Responding to Orality in African Literature
- Chapter 3 The Idea of Africa
- Chapter 4 African Responses to European Literature about Africa
- Chapter 5 The Traveling Archive
- Part II Memories
- Part III Maps
- Index
- References
Chapter 1 - The Colonial Archive
from Part I - Sources
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2025
Book contents
- African Literature in Transition
- African Literature in Transition
- African Literature in Transition
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Sources
- Chapter 1 The Colonial Archive
- Chapter 2 Responding to Orality in African Literature
- Chapter 3 The Idea of Africa
- Chapter 4 African Responses to European Literature about Africa
- Chapter 5 The Traveling Archive
- Part II Memories
- Part III Maps
- Index
- References
Summary
If, as Roberto González Echevarría argues, all fiction is written in relation to the archive, African literature is written with an eye to the colonial archive. That archive reflected an imperial will to knowledge and was an information system collected in an attempt to define and so control Africans. Writers such as Achebe, Tutuola, La Guma, and Coetzee have imagined it as a prison, as hell, or as a great maw. The meaning of the colonial archive changed as it receded into the past. African writers seek to supplement the archive in order to correct it (Sleigh, Gappah, D. Diop); resurrect those suffocated in it (Achebe, Christiansë); find ancestors (Krog, Joubert); escape the archive’s surveillance by imagining an outside (Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer); or honor the dead (Samkange, Djebar). African literature resists and subverts the archive but is also haunted by it. The colonial archive is itself now a trope shared among African writers (Achebe and Adichie), becoming an element in the archive of African literature.
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- African Literature in TransitionThe Archive of African Literature, 1800–2000, pp. 15 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
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