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This paper explores the problem of collective memory as a form of memorization that hinders the process of remembering in John Maxwell Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête (2013). Drawing on existing research in the field of memory studies and narratology, I argue that the two novels, as historiographic metafiction, adopt a narrative strategy that embeds the previously established discourses of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and L'Étranger (1942) as false stories, then engage in an aggressive subversion. Foe as well as Meursault, contre-enquête access/borrow the canon, yet go beyond the colonial dilemma, highlighting the possibility of indulging in a counter-discursive strategy. While engaging European historical and fictional records, this strategy expands beyond the binary opposition of colonizer/colonized to turn the focus toward the national, the regional, or the local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a reassessment of Chimamanda Adichie's feminist vision in her award-wining 2006 novel, Half of Yellow Sun. Through a reading of the novel as genocide fiction, I argue in the paper that the feminist vision in Half of a Yellow Sun contains a major flaw in how it portrays Igbo men. The image of the 'Igbo man' in the novel, as I contend, is presented as what I describe as hubristic masculinity. I trace the image of this hubristic Igbo masculinity as exemplified in Half of a Yellow Sun to Chinua Achebe's hero in Things Fall Apart--Okonkwo. I argue that the masculinity epitomized by Okonkwo has been misappropriated as normative Igbo maleness in Half of a Yellow Sun, leading to a misrepresentation of the Biafra tragedy, a failure to hold perpetrators of violence accountable for crimes, and, importantly, a representational practice of blaming Igbo men for the tragedy of Biafra. Accordingly, this paper rejects the critical reception of this image of the Igbo man, especially in feminist scholarship on Biafra, writing that accepts it as an accurate and unproblematic representation of Igbo maleness and Igbo men's historical place during the conflict., INTRODUCTION Several critics of Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (HYS) have praised the novel for its reinvention of 'the genre of domestic fiction by using it to tell [...]

This paper examines a number of African-authored narratives (novels and film) in the light of recent thinking about futurism and the role of speculative fiction as a means of envisioning the future. Uppinder Mehan, coeditor of the first ever anthology of 'postcolonial science fiction and fantasy,' So Long Been Dreaming, notes that postcolonial writing has rarely 'pondered that strange land of the future' and warns, 'If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again' (Mehan 270). Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, expands on this to argue that, while the 'practice of countermemory as ... an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten' has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by 'contemporary African artists ... [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act' (292). The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extra-realist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. The turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre in the 21st century has notably been embraced by women writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, in whose work gender/femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures. The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those characterized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures to which they point. The paper argues, therefore, that such narratives, rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy, deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking., HISTORY OF A GENRE The social realist strain of much Anglophone African literature that has, since the inaugural moment of Things Fall Apart (1958), dominated the landscape and shaped critical [...]

This paper reappraises Thomas Mofolo's Chaka as a novel that covertly subverts the biblical and colonial notions of sin, salvation, and backwardness that were part of the colonialist enterprise's ideological corpus in Africa—the so called "civilizing mission"—and very astutely deconstructs, and then reconstructs, the character of Chaka into a messianic figure whose ultimate death (and betrayal) at the hands of his own attracts the kind of sympathy that is reserved only for fallen heroes and, consequently, prophets. While a number of critics have looked at some of the biblical implications of Mofolo's fictionalized rendering of the Zulu cultural and historical universe under king Chaka, it is only somewhat hesitantly that Chaka has been read assertively as an anticolonial and resistance novel that, by attributing to Chaka a trajectory and destiny that closely mirror those of Jesus Christ, has sought to subvert the missionary ethos of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Congolese-born French writer Alain Mabanckou is the architect and creative entrepreneur of a world literature project that unmakes the Francophone African novel into a world literature text and recalibrates the relations between literary traditions in the category of world literature. The undisciplined intertextuality of Mabanckou's Verre cassé [ Broken Glass ], the novel that propelled him onto the global literary marketplace, serves as a good example of the new geopolitics of literature that the writer envisions. These are horizontal geopolitics, along the lines of what Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o theorized, albeit in utopian fashion, as "globalectics," meaning a horizontal way of doing and reading world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the novel and the nation continues to vex theorists as spatial categories shift and evolve around the globe. Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles, a novel with much acclaim but little critical attention, speaks to this relationship and suggests that the contemporary novel can serve as a vehicle for unmapping the nation. This paper argues that Isegawa's text transcends formal and geographical boundaries, respatializing the coming-of-age text by creating a protagonist who embodies a migrational spatial practice. In particular, it looks at the novel's final two books, 'Triangular Revelations' and 'Ghettoblaster,' and claims that Abyssinian Chroniclesreplaces the rite of incorporation with a rite of triangulation comprised of ongoing mobility and a dynamic and deconstructive cartographical approach. This approach accounts for the cartographical disjunctions of the contemporary era and serves as a rejoinder to the imperialist and interventionist maps imposed on the continent in earlier periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matthew Omelsky has recently coined the term 'African Anthropocene' to describe how the intertwined crises wrought by global capitalism and man-made ecological disaster have disproportionately affected the African continent. This paper discusses a short story collection by the Ugandan writer Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun (2014), as one instance of an African aesthetics that uniquely registers and responds to this dual crisis. I focus in particular on the 'vampire story' that opens this collection, arguing that Dila not only reinvents, but, in critical ways, 'mutates' the canonical Euro-American vampire figure. In reimagining the aristocratic European vampire as a mutant, genetically modified swarm of mosquitos, Dila's story suggests new, environmental forms of the monstrous emerging at the confluence of ecological catastrophe and corporate neocolonialism. At the same time, I show how Dila's fiction draws on the history of colonialism in Africa in imagining modes of survival within this vampiric ecology. In order to unpack the political implications of what I call Dila's 'mutational aesthetics,' I trace Dila's attempts to imagine forms of human-nonhuman entanglement that delink from a Western episteme and its ideological carapace of 'the human,' providing instead post-humanist visions of survival and refuge., The scene is a remote Ugandan town. A plague of outsized vampire mosquitoes--the mutant descendants of a benign species engineered to be unable to carry malaria--has desiccated the vicinity's mammalian [...]

In this paper I make two principal and related arguments. First, I contend that the protracted crisis in state legitimacy that afflicts the Mozambican postcolonial state toward the end of its revolutionary period (1975-86), and perhaps well into its neoliberal phase (1986-present), is lucidly and astutely analyzed in the fiction of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. Second, I seek to map out the ways in which Khosa proposes a scrupulous reconsideration of Mozambique's hidden, neglected, and indeed often repudiated 'traditional' ways of knowing and engaging with the world., One can only open up a little window at a time on that rambling edifice of mystery rooms known as the African continent--it will be decades yet, if not centuries, [...]

BY SAM NAIDU AND ELIZABETH LE ROUX U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2017. vii + 200 pages. ISBN 9781869143558 paper. doi: 10.2979/reseafrilite.50.2.19 A Survey of South African Crime Fiction makes an [...]

This article considers the uses of multilingualism in Adichie's body of creative work. As against Ngugi wa Thiong'o's stipulation that authentic African literature must be written in indigenous languages, Adichie adopts a primarily English narrative medium, while at the same time interpolating a wealth of igbo content. In this respect her practice coincides with that of a number of other Nigerian writers ranging from Achebe to Nwaubani, but reaches beyond theirs in its variety and artistry of effect. Although this 'mixing' might invite charges of market-targeted exoticism, it actually succeeds in transmitting to readers a familiarizing, rather than estranging, sense of character and conduct. Adichie's self-consciousness regarding language springs from, and rewardingly honors, the complexities of the Nigerian linguistic matrix that has fostered her talent., Near the close of Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, the professorial Odenigbo alludes glumly to 'the success of the white man's mission in Africa.' [...]