Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the widely acknowledged ur-text that launched the anglophone African novel on to the international literature scene. Although this novel succeeded in challenging imperial cultural stereotypes of Africa through strategically represented Igbo characters and community, who come metonymically to figure the wider continent, it also established the trend where romantic love is relegated to the background of other more prioritised concerns. However, since eros is so significant a part of human relationships, the novel does not elide romance entirely. Instead, romantic love interludes are presented as brief counterpoints to the ‘utilitarian’ marriage which forms a more substantial narrative focus. The love story of the tragic hero, Okonkwo, and his second wife, Ekwefi, is at odds with social conventions which do not dictate that love should constitute the rationale for marriage. Economic considerations prevent Ekwefi and Okonkwo from marrying when they fall in love, but do not preclude them from marrying later when passionate desire causes Ekwefi to leave her first husband for Okonkwo. This love story, which ends in polygynous marriage, contrasts with the love-marriage plot as it has developed in Anglo-American literary history. In the western version of the love-marriage plot, which has acquired a global normativity through globalised media and culture, love is an essential condition for marriage. Because love is also culturally understood as mutually exclusive, the western love-marriage is necessarily monogamous. Achebe’s first novel implicitly suggests the cultural specificity of the globally dominant love-marriage plot with its own opening up of a wider range of connections between love and marriage.

Ahdaf Soueif(b. 1950) is one of the few Egyptian authors writing inEnglish, and probably the most well known. Born in Cairo andeducated in both Cairo and England, Soueif combines activismand art in a range of genres that encompasses short stories,the novel, autobiography and essays. Translation, both ofher own work into Arabic and Arabic publications intoEnglish, is not only part of her professional repertoire,but broader questions of linguistic and cultural translationare key themes of her fiction. Soueif has won a number ofliterary awards, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in1999 for her second novel, The Map of Love(1999). Although her literary reputation is not in need of‘favourable mention’ by intellectual and scholarlyluminaries, it seems remiss to neglect the importanceaccorded her first novel, In the Eye of theSun (1992), by Edward Said. ‘The Anglo-ArabEncounter: On Ahdaf Soueif’ in the collection,Reflections on Exile (2002), suggeststhat Arab-Anglophone crosscultural, translational exchangeis inherent in Ahdaf's project through the mere fact of therepresentation of Arab culture through the English language,refracted through English literature and culture. Ahdaf'sfiction is striking for its acknowledged intertextualengagements with English literature, especiallynineteenth-century literature. Furthermore, the novel'sinherent structural ‘worldliness’, using the term in itsSaidian sense, signifies the emergence of Arabic literaturefrom the constraints of narrow nationalism into a liberatoryinternationalism. What Said observes about Soueif's firstnovel may as aptly be applied to her second novel,The Map of Love. Both novels are thefocus of this essay, but through the lens of questions ofhuman relations, which are a noticeably neglected dimensionof cultural and literary studies generally.

This book emerged out of a conviction that environment and animals are vital to an all-encompassing flourishing – where the word ‘vital’ suggests more than just ‘important’ but, retrieving its deeper etymological root, where environment and animals are ‘vita’– they are life itself. This book emerged out of a conviction, and not much else: there has been no funding or major conferences behind it. These facts about the coming into existence of the volume have had paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, the individual members of the community that has been established through the volume, for the most part, have never physically met except through the conversations conducted in cyberspace beneath the tree of knowledge of our project site. The conviction that has inspired the volume has therefore not imposed a massive carbon cost on the environment it is moved to respect but, instead, has relied on ‘clean’ technologies. One might say that it has translated theory into praxis. However, the ‘clean’ technology that has allowed the digital cultural communion of the contributors could not have emerged without just over three centuries of dirty industrialisation, and its concomitant global social, cultural and economic cost to people, animals and environment.

This book has been motivated by the instinct that recognition of the life of animals and the significance of the natural world are not foreign to continental Africa, but are deeply constitutive of the cultures that together create a strategically essentialised Africa in the postcolonial period. This intuition could not be verified because the scholarship, with the regional exception of South Africa and its strong focus on literary culture, for the most part does not exist. Mention must be made here, however, of the publication of the papers presented at a conference titled ‘Literature, Nature and the Land: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Environment’, which was convened at the University of Zululand, South Africa, in 1992. The conference proceedings include papers on several African writers, including Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor, Wole Soyinka, Es'kia Mphahlele and Mazisi Kunene, among others.

Cheryll Glotfelty, in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996), identifies 1993 as the year in which ecocriticism emerged as a clearly defined critical school in the Anglo- American academy.

This book takes as its point of theoretical departure the argument presented by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self about individualism, modernity and morality. Individualism is a term frequently invoked, but rarely defined or used with consistency. In what represents the most cogent elucidation of the topic, Taylor suggests that individualism is the historically limited form of identity constituted by modernity in the societies of the North-Atlantic. Individualism is the form taken by modern identity, which simultaneously constitutes the concept of identity itself. Philosophically, he shows that any enquiry into the subject, requires that the self be situated within a moral horizon. For Taylor, “selfhood and the good, … selfhood and morality, [are] inextricably intertwined themes” (Sources 3). According to Taylor, the final rupture with earlier forms of subjectivity occurs around the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries when an historically unprecedented break occurs. While the moral horizon had always existed externally in a social and transcendental ideal, in the period of modernity the ethical horizon against which the self is oriented is perceived to be internal to the subject it self-reflexively defines. For the first time, the higher order is not external to the person; instead, the moral sources of the self are seen to be located within the autonomous individual.

Internalisation of moral sources is the key idea applied to the analysis of Farah's novels, which are especially interesting since they adopt a form which does not emerge from Somali social and cultural conditions. Farah's novels are also an interesting case study of the relationship of individualism with the novel since they encapsulate a history of the novel in the career of a single author.

This book examines Novalis's observation that philosophy, or the pursuit of truth, is ultimately a form of nostalgia for undivided identity, being one with oneself – being “at home”. Entry into the conception of individual identity however, in itself, fundamentally destabilises the subject thus formed. The question about identity – “Who am I?” – framed as a question asked by the procedurally rational subject, through splitting the observed and observing subjects, fractures the self thus conceived. Novalis perceives very clearly at the historical moment when this form of subjectivity triumphs in European culture that the unity of the subject and, finally also the unity of the subject and object worlds, depend upon disengaging the subject from a social-transcendent horizon, but, crucially, restoring unity through the concept of Dichtung which has been variously translated as art, “poesy” or fiction. This formal understanding of an ethical orientation for self-realisation is different from non-modern conceptions which are ultimately based upon a substantive rationalism constituted against a traditional social-transcendent order. The art which emerges out of this profound shift constitutes a moral horizon unlike any other since it appears to be based wholly upon freedom, not obligation.

The analysis of Gifts in the previous chapter suggested resolution of the contradiction of individualist subject formation through the principle of textuality. Aesthetic resolution of the inherent contradiction of individualism, in fact, achieves its clearest expression in A Naked Needle, a much earlier novel. The techniques of modernism employed in this novel ultimately allow form, the aesthetic, to represent the higher order which realism could not, without tension, allow to emerge from the autonomous self.

Literary modernism is probably the most significant influence on the novels of Nuruddin Farah. With the exception of From a Crooked Rib which shares realism's preoccupation with presenting a convincing character who constructs a moral order from reason and personal experience, the subsequent novels draw on the techniques of the “postindividualist” order scripted by modernism. Modernism informs Farah's novels in various ways. In fact, the trilogy form used by Farah, in which particular themes are fully developed over three novels, is strongly influenced by Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Many of the epigraphs which introduce the novels and sections of novels are drawn from the works of modernist writers like Yeats and Conrad. Often in their structure, the novels allude to other modernist novels. A case in point is the similarity of the structure of Sardines to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, referred to in more detail in the earlier discussion of the transformation of the classical Bildungsroman in some of the novels.

This chapter focuses on the novels of the “Past Imperfect” trilogy, Links, Knots and Crossbones. The chapter shows that the radically fragmented identity which was suggested by the novels of the second trilogy is ultimately at odds with Farah's commitment to the reconstruction of the Somali state and society, even though this split subjectivity seems to connote freedom. The novels of the third trilogy trace a return to some form of centred subjectivity. The protagonist in Links is a relatively coherent subject whose quest, in part, involves forming associational bonds with others which do not existentially bind the subject. Knots explores in more detail the nature of the strategically centred subject which Links assumes. Ideas of “performative” subjectivity run through Knots. The subject is no longer schizophrenically split. Now the relatively coherent subject, in a model drawn from theatre, assumes different personae (masks) responding to the exigencies of various contexts. The performative subjectivity presented in Knots enjoys a coherency which permits agency. But this subjectivity does not appear to be formed in relation to any idea of ultimate truth, whether internal, located in individual reason, emotion or spirit; or external, oriented in relation to a traditional or religious code. The coherent subject, whose role is determined entirely contextually, seems, with a justification internal to itself, to be able to exclude those forms of subjectivity which acknowledge an external ethics. In some ways the journey traced by Farah's novels is a journey which returns to a transformed type of realist subjectivity.

From a Crooked Rib (1970), Farah's first published book, drew its author onto the international literary scene, despite what were considered its aesthetic shortcomings. The book is supposed to have been written in less than a month when Farah was a philosophy student at the University of Chandigarh in India. Perhaps because of its perceived inadequacies it has not received as much critical attention as the later fiction, especially the trilogies. This novel is fundamental, however, in defining the boundaries of the novelistic sub-genre, namely the novel of autonomous personal development or Bildungsroman, which constitutively embodies Farah's worldview. The features which characterise this sub-genre of the novel also define the novel itself. These elements are explored, expanded and sometimes even apparently subverted in Farah's later fiction. This chapter thus attempts to reveal the foundational individualist premise of the realist novel, from which the later modernist and postmodern novels proceed.

The novel takes its title from a Somali proverb: “God created woman from a crooked rib; and anyone who trieth to straighten it, breaketh it.” The reference to origins in the title is echoed in the circumstances of the book's publication. From a Crooked Rib is both Farah's first published novel and the first Somali novel in history.

This chapter picks up the thread from Chapter 4 where a modernist resolution of the contradiction of individualism was explored. Chapter 5 was tangential to the argument. It considered the one exception in Farah's oeuvre, namely, Close Sesame, which attempts to represent a heteronomous subject through the narrative mode of the novel which privileges autonomy. Earlier the central compromise of realism was explored. Realism compromises the contradiction that individual autonomy finally submits to socialisation through irony in closure. Chapter 4 suggests that the techniques of modernism allow irony to reflect on itself. Self-reflexive irony is inherently concerned with aesthetic questions and tends to take the form of textuality. The contradiction encountered by realism disappears in the idea that both the self and society are literary constructs. Postmodernism, this chapter argues, assumes what modernism shows through various formal techniques. Modernism shows that the subject is a collage of literary fragments. Postmodernism proceeds from the idea of the divided subject. This chapter proposes, through a reading primarily of Maps, the Farah novel which provoked the greatest scholarly interest, that postmodern “schizophrenic” identity is not a radical critique of the autonomous subject for whom the ethical sources are constructed through individual reason or intuition.

Autonomous personality development is so crucial to Farah's vision that Bildung is an element of most of his novels, even if the formation ideal is invoked only to be in some way challenged. Frequently, however, the challenge to autonomous development paradoxically affirms disengaged subjectivity. Baldly stated, all Farah's novels are Bildungsromane which, whether classical or dissensual, “naturalize and normalize” (Slaughter, “The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law” 1409-411) the disengaged self. Critics observe similarly that most of Farah's novels share some generic affinity with the detective novel, the narrative form constituted around the interrogation of a mystery which must be solved. These dual generic affinities may not counteract each other. The central mystery which Farah's oeuvre addresses is the question of identity – “Who am I?” – a question explicitly posed by the boy protagonist, Askar, in Maps. The question of identity, framed as an ontological question, cannot arise in non-modern cultures. In a non-individualist culture, as Charles Taylor notes in Sources of the Self, the question may be asked as a consequence of momentary amnesia. It might also be asked in the context of an anguished confession of a departure from a sacred or social ideal. In an individualist culture, however, the question is an index of a disengaged, interiorised self. The answer to the question, “Who am I?” in modernity, in the novel generally, and in Farah's novels in particular, is an answer which originates seemingly wholly from within the subject him/herself. The appeal, “Who am I?”, the quest and the fulfillment are all apparently wholly internal.

Close Sesame, the final book of the “Dictatorship” trilogy, is unique in Farah's corpus. To capture what makes this novel exceptional it is necessary to be reminded of the constitutive presupposition of the classic realist novel, which modernism and postmodernism, through the specific terms of abrogation, ironically reaffirm. The realist novel may better be distinguished against the genre of the epic which, along with lyric, drama, oral tales and journalistic broadsheets, were drawn into a new genre which, in its openness, appears to elude generic definition itself. The epic is the story of how the hero is lost but finally returns “home” to a “transcendent truth”.