This article combines methodologies from corpus linguistics with an experimental-like setup more affiliated to psycholinguistic research. The resulting methodology allows us to gain more insight into cognitive motivations of language use in speakers from the past, and consequently to better assess their similarity to present-day speakers (the Uniformitarian Principle). One such cognitive motivation thought to be relevant in the early stages of grammatical constructionalization (grammaticalization) is covered by the evasive concept of ‘extravagance’ (i.e. the desire to talk in such a way that one is noticed). The methodology is tested on the Early Modern English extension of the [be Ving]-construction to progressive uses in present-tense main clauses. It is argued, on the basis of recurrent contextual clues, that [be Ving] in this novel use is motivated by extravagance. Interestingly, a comparison of two speaker/writer generations that are among the earliest to use this innovation with some frequency suggests that the encoding of extravagance shifted between them. At first, extravagance was signalled by coercion of the still stative semantics of [be Ving] into a progressive reading. In the second generation it had become an entrenched characteristic of the construction itself.

In their contribution to this special issue, De Smet & Van de Velde suggest that the analysability of a morphologically complex word is an indicator of how easily that word is primed by elements that are formed by the same word formation process. To illustrate, hearing or reading the words roughly, equally and luckily within a short span of time should activate the word formation process of ly-suffixation in the listener's mind, so that the subsequent production of fully compositional ly-adverbs, as for instance permanently or comfortably, should become relatively more likely.

This essay on genres acknowledges the constructed nature of the fluid classifications that form around recognized and recognizable types of creative work. Some systems of classification owe their recognition to powerful cultural intermediaries. Others, often located in the realm of popular culture, emerge without input from cultural intermediaries. As constructed groupings of works, genres matter for their ability to generate distinct circuits of transmission that allow for a specific type of encounter with the work and a type of response to the work.

Twenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

This article discusses Tejumola Olaniyan’s submissions in his essay “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” by problematizing some of his submissions on the temporalities, especially the global and the post-global, that have inflected the field of African literary discourse since the second half of the twentieth century. In doing this, the essay queries the idea that the category of the nation-state has been exhausted or overwhelmed by the global and the post-global. The essay suggests instead that the nation-state has been retooled and rearmed by a nascent temporality, the post-truth, in ways that have significant consequences for African literatures.

Africa, and the specificities of its individual countries’ colonial experiences, poses important questions concerning genre and popular culture. Specifically, it is difficult to situate something like, for example, “crime fiction,” using the “culture industries” model proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Although helpful, Stuart Hall’s major rehabilitation of the popular removed Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural elitism but nevertheless continued to tie the popular to a mode of production concomitant with late capitalism. What, this essay asks, should then be done with the “popular” productions of an African continent that has been systematically underdeveloped? Likewise, how should we categorize the work of Francophone African writers of noir whose books are principally sold in France? These cases further destabilize the already precarious concept of the popular, not only in its application to Africa, but globally.

In this introduction to this special issue, “Genre and Africa,” Jaji and Saint theorize genre from the perspective of the African continent to explore how such an orientation necessarily interrogates and transforms previous understandings of genre. After a brief review of pivotal work in genre studies, the authors turn to Africa’s particular colonial and postcolonial predicaments to theorize the specific interventions to genre theory that such a vantage point affords. Interwoven are summaries and commentary upon the six essays included in the issue. The introduction then concludes by highlighting several new directions of genre study occasioned by this issue’s contents, including the rise of new media and renewed interest in the intersections of popular forms and affect studies.

A response to my interlocutors and a reaffirmation, through a consideration of the place of Africa in the modern world, of the post-global as a productive reading frame.

Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935) offers opportunities to introduce and explore a variety of theoretical, historical, and ethical issues in the classroom. A canonical text of Indian writing in English, the novel presents a day in the fictionalized life of a Dalit (“untouchable”) boy in colonial India. As such, it is situated aesthetically in the triangular tension between colonial modernity, Gandhian nationalism, and Ambedkarite anti-caste radicalism. Untouchable enables rich discussions in relationship to these aspects through contextualization and comparison. Especially fruitful is re-evaluating the novel in the light of new work in relationship to caste.

In “African Literature in the Post-Global Age” Tejumola Olaniyan is to be found asking: Where is the world at—and Africa with it? And for Olaniyan, the contemporary world is most ideally mapped as “post-global.” The purview of the post-global—its “field commonsense”—yields a world of humanity beyond the boundaries of nation, race, and territory, joined in commonalities of global need and planetary responsibility. What are the implications of the world thus known for Africanist literary practice? Can it rightly continue to be a particularist practice dedicated in restricted humanist service to Africa known in racialist, nationalist, and nativist particularity? Or ought Africanist practice to direct its humanism expansively to the service of a world in transnational and cosmopolitan linkage? Olaniyan wants Africanist literary practice to be post-global—and therefore universalist. But is Africanist literary practice well served in discarding the particular? This essay is guided in answer by Aimé Césaire’s caveat: “There are two ways to lose oneself: by segregation in the particular or by dilution in the universal.”

In a continent remarkable for its receptivity to “creative potentiality,” a glimpse at its thriving universe of popular arts quickly reveals the limits of dogmatic, discipline-centered devotion to “genre” (Barber, 2000). And while the “open and incorporative” nature of West African popular production is certainly animated by the basic elements of genre, framing the concept as a finite product of ordered literary laws seems incongruous with practical and popular articulations on the continent. At the intersection of print and visual culture—another synthesis of genres—the Yorùbá Photoplay Series are borne from an array of literary and nonliterary sources, processes and contexts that resonated strongly with pseudo-literate, yet deeply engaged, co-creative audiences at the dawn of colonial independence.

In this article, I revisit a familiar narrative format of the moral narrative that I argue is used to narrate stories of (especially) women in the public sphere in Kenya. Reading a range of media texts, I trace a pattern of representation that I identify as contained within a recognizable genre of the moral narrative and use this genre to identify a structure of narrative of issues around gender and sexuality in Kenya. The examples are drawn from a popular radio drama program as well as from popular press reports of wayward women. The article also engages counter-narratives created by women such Vera Sidika and Huddah Monroe who, by publicly displaying their near-naked bodies in public platforms, create room for a counter-reading of discourses of gender and sexuality in the Kenyan public imaginary. This article will push the boundaries for reading popular cultural forms caught within generic constraints and reflect on the value counter-readings have in complicating readings of gender and sexuality in Kenya more generally.

In response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

This essay is a brief response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s article titled “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense.” Taking up the concept of the “post-global” advanced in Olaniyan’s article, this essay argues for the continued relevance of the concept of postcoloniality as it emerged in literary and cultural criticism in the 1990s.

This essay examines the recent rise in popularity of science fiction in Africa. I argue that this growth can be traced to key shifts within the logic of structural adjustment programs. Over the last twenty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have begun to place a heightened emphasis on “poverty reduction strategies” (or PRSs). These PRSs have taken the two organizations’ longstanding commitment to free-market policies and adapted them to the rhetoric of social and economic justice by suggesting that “sustainable” welfare programs can only be constructed through the “long-term” benefits of well-planned “institutions.”

As I show, this vision of long-term development has encouraged a move toward fictional forms capable of speaking to elongated temporal scales. Using Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon as my primary example, I investigate how sci-fi narratives have struggled to represent social agency within the longue durée of institutional planning.

“Yes, but . . .” subscribes fully to the arguments on the basis of which Tejumola Olaniyan refutes the often unspoken axioms such as the “corporeal” test by which what counts as genuinely “African” in African literary scholarship is determined. In those arguments, which appear in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” (PLI 3.3 [2016]: 387–96), he outlines very explicitly the views about the objects of study, methodologies, and critical theories that have implicitly guided the most powerful scholarship on African literature at least since the 1990s. It expresses some concern, however, that, in calling for a reformation of the “ideological test” that appears to tether African Marxist criticism to the critic’s identity, Olaniyan may have inadvertently left open a back door through which the corporeal axiom could sneak back into African literary criticism. To preempt this, it questions the narrative of globalization on the basis of which he posits the category of the “Post-Global Age.” More specifically, it argues that the temporal scheme represented in the “post” in the “post-global” on which his understanding of globalization rests is flawed. Finally, substituting “late capitalism” for globalization, it argues that “If what late capitalism/globalization longs for is to render capitalism as ineluctable ‘as fate,’ then African literary criticism is obliged ‘to consider the possibility that, to the question, “Are “post,” “trans,” and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for African literature’ ” that Olaniyan poses, “the answer could be a qualified interrogative rather than a simple affirmative: ‘Yes, but . . . ?’ not ‘Yes.’ ”