African Literature and Social Change

Olakunle George

Description

Alert to the ways in which critical theory and imaginative literature can enrich each other, African Literature and Social Change reframes the ongoing project of African literature. Concentrating on texts that are not usually considered together—writings by little-known black missionaries, so called "black whitemen," and better-known 20th century intellectuals and creative writers—Olakunle George shows the ways in which these writings have addressed notions of ethnicity, nation, and race and how the debates need to be rehistoricized today. George presents Africa as a site of complex desires and contradictions, refashioning the way African literature is positioned within current discussions of globalism, diaspora, and postcolonialism.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Missionary Moments
1. Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora
2. Mission Tide: Bishop S. A. Crowther and the "Black Whitemen"
3. Decolonization Time: Abrahams, James, Wright
4. Globalization Time: Achebe, Soyinka, and Beyond
Epilogue: Gaps
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Literary Criticism
• African
• African people

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780253029324
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

AFRICAN LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
AFRICAN LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Tribe, Nation, Race
Olakunle George
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Olakunle George
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: George, Olakunle, author.
Title: African literature and social change : tribe, nation, race / Olakunle George.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017032853 (print) | LCCN 2017024198 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253029324 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253025463 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253025807 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: African literature (English)-19th century-History and criticism. | African literature (English)-20th century-History and criticism. | Literature and society-Africa-History-19th century. | Literature and society-Africa-History-20th century. | Social change in literature. | Ethnicity in literature.
Classification: LCC PR9340.5 (print) | LCC PR9340.5 .G44 2017 (ebook) | DDC 820.996-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032853
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
Dedicated to Isidore Okpewho, 1941-2016 Rest in peace, Prof .
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Missionary Moments
1 Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora
2 Mission Tide: Bishop S. A. Crowther and the Black Whitemen
3 Decolonization Time: Abrahams, James, Wright
4 Globalization Time: Achebe, Soyinka, and Beyond
Epilogue: Gaps
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK HAS taken longer than I envisaged when I fitfully started working on it. Along the way, I have benefited from the assistance of many institutions, colleagues, and friends. I thank the staff of the following libraries for their help while I tried to find my way around the materials in their possession: Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston; Special Collections, School of Oriental and African Studies, London; Public Records and Archives Administration Department of Ghana (PRAAD), Accra; and the Divinity Library, Yale University. For permission to reproduce images for which they hold copyright, I am grateful to the Church Missionary Society, the Wesley Historical Society library, Oxford Brookes University, and Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos. In particular, thanks to Peter S. Forsaith, Ian Killeen, Liz Millard, Ken Osborne, and Michael Shulman for responding expeditiously to my inquiries.
Over the years, the following colleagues invited me to present talks or conference papers that pushed me to impose a semblance of coherence on my arguments: Susan Andrade, Yogita Goyal, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Arlene Keizer, Lu s Madureira, Piret Peiker, Bonnie Roos, and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma. I thank Susan Andrade also for recommending Magnum Photos. I owe a debt of gratitude to colleagues and countless conference interlocutors who posed questions or offered comments on portions of the book in its long road up to this point. You will know who you are; please know as well that I am profoundly grateful. I feel privileged to be able to salute Kofi Agawu for being a tireless interlocutor-in-chief, Patrick Mensah for conversations that reenergize, Conrad James for helping to make my Edgbaston visits enjoyable, and Harry Garuba for the gift of our marathon phone conversations. Many thanks as well to Mark Seltzer for providing his distinctive critical eye at a crucial stage of my revisions, and to Rey Chow for her collegiality and the lunches on Thayer Street.
The following friends, compatriots, and senior colleagues contributed in many different ways, often without knowing it, to enriching and moving this work along: Leke Adeeko, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sina Gbadamosi, Kunle Akinsipe, Akin Adesokan, Kunle Ajibade, Simon Gikandi, Abiola Irele, Biodun Jeyifo, Eileen Julien, Neil ten Kortenaar, Loka Losambe, Moji Olaniyan, Teju Olaniyan, and Femi Taiwo. Thanks, all, for your support and for being there. Another round of thanks are due to my undergraduate teachers at the University of Ibadan, most especially Dan S. Izevbaye, Molara Ogundipe, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, and Niyi Osundare. Isidore Okpewho left us too soon, yet I will forever think of him each time I teach the epic of Sundiata in any version. To echo the language of the griots you studied, Prof: this tune is calling you!
I am grateful to my colleagues at Brown, and the wonderful staff of the English department office: Marianne Costa; Jane Donnelly, Lorraine Mazza, Suzie Nacar, Marilyn Netter, and Ellen Viola. I am grateful, too, to graduate students who took my seminars over the years and had to tolerate my half-baked ideas. In particular, I thank these fellows for putting up with me: Weihsin Gui, David Babcock, Adrian Genette, Chris Holmes, Derek Ettensohn, David Liao, Sachelle Ford, Minta Zlomke, Swetha Regunathan, Jenny Snow, and Anna Thomas. My undergraduate students deserve a special word of appreciation: they continue to teach me that the classroom is one place where literary studies can come into its own in concrete social articulation. I count myself lucky that Dee Mortensen was my editor on this project. Dee s great e-mail reminders seemed always to arrive when I most needed them, and I sincerely thank her and her staff. Her professionalism and critical advice contributed in a big way to making this book possible. Finally, hearty thanks to Evelyn Oby, in everything my coconspirator, and to our children, Ayo and Tosin, for giving us so much joy.
Portions of this book appeared earlier as journal articles and are used here in revised form: The Narrative of Conversion in Chinua Achebe s Arrow of God , Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 4 (2005): 344-62, copyright (c) 2005, The Pennsylvania State University, by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press; The Native Missionary, the African Novel, and In-Between, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 26, no. 1 (2002): 5-25, (c) Novel Corp., 2003; and The National and the Transnational: Soyinka s The Interpreters and Ak : The Years of Childhood , Novel: A Forum on Fiction 41, no. 2/3 (2008): 279-97, (c) Novel Corp., 2008.
Introduction: Missionary Moments
T HIS BOOK IS about iterations of what I call missionary moments in the representation of Africa by selected African and black diasporic intellectuals. By the term missionary moments , I refer to three historical junctures and the writers varied responses to them. First is the mid-nineteenth century, marked by abolitionism, Christian evangelism, and the tainted productivities of mercantile capitalism. Roughly, this would span the years 1834-84-that is, from the British abolition of slavery to the era of the Scramble and the Berlin Conference. The second moment is the first half of the twentieth century, marked by black internationalism, anticolonialism, and discourses of development and modernization. This we can date from the turn of the century to the decolonization era of the 1950s and 1960s. The third is our contemporary context, marked by globalization in political economy and paradigms of globalism in literary studies. I focus specifically on three kinds of texts about Africa: writings by black missionaries and converts-the so-called black whitemen, who worked in West Africa in the nineteenth century; nonfictional texts by intellectuals associated with the Pan-African internationalism of the 1950s; and imaginative literature by the Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, both of them central to the discursive field of African Literature as it is read and taught today. 1
My purpose in the chapters that follow is to accomplish three things. I aim, first, to demonstrate ways in which the texts expose the contradictory interplay between notions of tribe, nation, and race in modern Africa. Second, I argue that the texts often deploy a familiar rhetoric of sacrifice, even as they invite us to question its universal seductiveness. Following this, I suggest that in our moment of globalization and so-called failed states, African writing is best approached under the sign of social change, not cultural or identitarian retrieval. In unveiling the interplay of tribe-nation-race, and in grappling with sacrifice as trope and trauma, the writers position Africa differently, such that the continent is not merely an object of quantitative social-scientific knowledge or-as is often the case in popular media-static signifier of crisis. Instead, Africa emerges as a testament to the challenge and promise of social change, a site for the specific kind of knowledge that imaginative literature, and acts of language more broadly, can yield.
We don t need to look far to identify the intellectual and political background to my concerns. Since the public self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian young man who set himself on fire in December 2010 and thereby ignited protes