Nigerian Literary Imagination and the Nationhood Project

296 Pages·2022·5.023 MB·English

by  Toyin Falola

AFRICAN HISTORIES
AND MODERNITIES
Nigerian Literary
Imagination and the
Nationhood Project
Toyin Falola
African Histories and Modernities
Series Editors
Toyin Falola
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
Matthew M. Heaton
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA, USA
This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to
and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a par-
ticular emphasis on historical developments. Specifically, it aims to refute
the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin,
spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed,
rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series
instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an
important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in
which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and conflict. While privi-
leging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will
also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the
contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understand-
ings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we
think about African and global histories.
Editorial Board
Akintunde Akinyemi, Literature, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
Malami Buba, African Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies,
Yongin, South Korea
Emmanuel Mbah, History, CUNY, College of Staten Island, USA
Insa Nolte, History, University of Birmingham, USA
Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o, International Studies, Rhodes College, USA
Samuel Oloruntoba, Political Science, TMALI, University of South Africa,
South Africa
Bridget Teboh, History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA
Toyin Falola
Nigerian Literary
Imagination and the
Nationhood Project
Toyin Falola
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
ISSN 2634-5773 ISSN 2634-5781 (electronic)
African Histories and Modernities
ISBN 978-3-031-01990-6 ISBN 978-3-031-01991-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01991-3
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To Dr. Doyin Aguoru, my mentor and senior alumnus
at the University of Ibadan.
P
reface
Nigerian literature has been subject to controversies since the 1960s, with
the exigency and imperative of its creative and ideological imagination
challenged on historical, forward-looking, and ahistorical grounds.
Although the conflict has been especially prominent between those favor-
ing a national imagination and those who support a culturally focused
nationalism, the divergence of these ideas may lie in a bifurcation between
cultural nationalism, or ethnocentrism, and nation-statist advocacy. On
other occasions, criticism is leveled against the literary tendency to propa-
gate “unnecessary” individuation of the world. This perspective places an
ideological embargo on any perceived fixation with the postcolonial sub-
ject, and it is sometimes framed as the literary imagination’s inability to
escape the entrapment of postcolonial agitation.
There are several other dichotomies. Feminist readings are set against
institutionalized male bias or the debated presence of patriarchal senti-
ments that flourish at the heart of the literary canon, setting trends for the
nation’s literary production. Works from the independence and anti-
colonial decade that were once referred to as “village novels” are com-
pared with Civil War literary productions and more urban ones. These
divisions are applied even though the works are various methods of grap-
pling with the same fiends: the colonial ordering of the nation-state, post-
colonial failures, and neo-colonial imperial control. The lifeworld of each
period represented in past, present, and future Nigerian literary produc-
tions has been challenged for lacking political ambition or being shackled
by their own private campaign or ideology.
vii
viii PREFACE
Other prominent critiques have focused on the increasing diasporic
pre-occupation of the nation’s literature, largely owing to the migrations
of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the global cosmo-
politanism and capitalism that steer the direction of national creativity and
youth culture. Extant dialogues on multiculturalism and cultural creativity
have become so thoroughly entwined with issues of migration, globalism,
cosmopolitanism, and neocolonialism that reading national literature in
any other way is nearly impossible. Also, the literary embrace of ideology-
driven classifications has been observed in modern subjectivities that
include the Afropolitan, the Pan-Africanist, or the Afrofuturist. The first
faces criticisms of classism and elitism, the second of undue fetishization
and essentialism, and the third has been accused of unoriginality border-
ing on capitulation to Western cultural and ideological productions.
Furthermore, there have also been re-readings of cosmopolitan con-
ceptions of modern Africans and Nigerians privileging the flows and inter-
flows changing the twenty-first century’s global culture through
digitization and unrestricted spatial formations. Even the working assump-
tions of these readings have faced a constant barrage of criticism for their
embrace of technology. Detractors cite the decline and devolution of oral
cultures, the dangers of techno-culture, the effects of capitalist or com-
moditizing networks on orality, and the hegemonic relation of digitality
and social realism. Literature concerned with or addressing globalist nar-
ratives and migratory experiences have been criticized for privileging non-
colonized Western spaces; it is challenged based on the trends it sets or
validates over the cultural formations of ex-colonies. These works have
been disparaged for allegedly centralizing a preference for exilic experi-
ences and lifestyles among a certain cohort of authors. They are also chal-
lenged for failing to address the more pressing concerns of postcolonialism,
continental experiences, and the fate of the Motherland in a rapidly chang-
ing world.
Also, there have been accusations of “poverty porn” and the undue
glorification of Africa’s failed modernity—to use a more familiar term, the
“aesthetic of suffering”—seen as deliberate pandering on the part of
authors who seek audiences, patronage, and residencies in the West. This
aesthetic is considered dominant among postcolonial writers accused of
seeking authorial validation, relevance, and career longevity in the West by
reinforcing squalid, destitute imagery of Nigeria. This particular criticism
is a curious case, being the exact opposite of the criticism leveled against
Negritude and the overly Afrocentric or Pan-Africanist writing that was
PREFACE ix
accused of fetishizing and unnecessarily glorifying Africa and Nigeria. As
the century progresses and literary productions shift, it stands to reason
that the images present in national literature will be significantly colored
and shaped by the moment in which it finds itself. It will also be affected
by those historical sources within which it finds relevance. The disciplinary
peculiarity of exercising the imagination as a source of literary production
also chooses the aspect of reality from which it is derived and selects the
locus of its enunciation.
Although the Nigerian literary imagination focuses on the Nigerian
nation (in all its guises and imperfections), it is constructed with materials
that are subjective to the national experiences that the author selected to
invest in or work with. This is why Nigerian literature, at several times in
Nigeria’s short history as a nation-state, has invested in multiple ideologi-
cal enterprises. It continues to receive criticism forged from different ideo-
logical bases. The question remains as to how and in what ways these
investments reveal the national imagination’s involvement with the project
of nationhood and nation-making. Within Nigeria, the nation-statist, ter-
ritorialized, and postcolonial spaces are deeply problematic. However, the
idea of literary imagination is preoccupied with several aspects of national
culture, history, progress, and other concepts while also incorporating the
idea of nationhood itself.
A partial, simplistic answer to this involvement has been given above,
but this book offers a more complex answer in following chapters. As
observed, conceived, and implemented by the literary imagination, the
nationhood project is shifting, continuous, and as historical as it is not.
The idea of a homogenous and naturally evolving nation is historically
fatuous and inapplicable to Nigeria, which means that it is not only com-
plex but also imperative for its literature to participate in nation-building.
In solving this problem, such a project is expected to adapt to several
cultural twists and turns that define the Nigerian experience. Ultimately,
these adaptations change its factuality and artifice, along with its disciplin-
ary and expressive specificities as an institution and an artistic enterprise.
This book approaches these questions by looking at how generational,
intergenerational, and contemporaneous literary products and their writ-
ers address incidents (historical and contemporary), ideologies (home-
grown/indigenous, Western, and global), and occasions that have defined
Nigeria over time.
Authors and their audiences use the devices and signifiers of literature
as a creative enterprise to re-world Nigeria as a nation-state. They
x PREFACE
creatively work with occasions and lived experiences according to
disciplinary expectations and patterns. This activity problematizes the
country’s constitution, commenting on its trajectory and the pathways it
has provided for the polity. Their work also suggests that the constitution
itself is progressive and prone to occasional revisions—this activity can be
done by in-group forces, of which the literary imagination is a praxis, or
by out- group forces. The Nigerian literary imagination offers a theory of
being Nigerian, rendering the practicalities of the Nigerian experience and
defining the conditions that have shaped the nation as a distinct entity. Its
work projects the invented nature of the nation while contributing to an
ongoing re-invention.
This book explores how literature and its imagination aid in the inven-
tion and participation in the re-invention of Nigeria as a nation. The chap-
ters focus on the colonial and postcolonial phases of Nigerian history,
exploring different periods, socio-cultural movements, and ideological
paradigms that gained prominence. The book also illustrates the fusion of
history and literature within literary imaginations, delving into significant
developments, events, ideologies, and experiences of Nigeria’s nationhood.
Ibadan, Nigeria Toyin Falola
January 2022