Remapping African Literature

348 Pages·2018·4.29 MB·English

by  Olabode Ibironke

AFRICAN HISTORIES AND MODERNITIES
REMAPPING
AFRICAN
LITERATURE
Olabode Ibironke
African Histories and Modernities
Series editors
Toyin Falola
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
particular 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
privileging 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 understandings
of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we think
about African and global histories.
Editorial Board
Aderonke Adesanya, Art History, James Madison University
Kwabena Akurang-Parry, History, Shippensburg University
Samuel O. Oloruntoba, History, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Tyler Fleming, History, University of Louisville
Barbara Harlow, English and Comparative Literature, University of Texas
at Austin
Emmanuel Mbah, History, College of Staten Island
Akin Ogundiran, Africana Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14758
Olabode Ibironke
Remapping African
Literature
Olabode Ibironke
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
African Histories and Modernities
ISBN 978-3-319-69295-1 ISBN 978-3-319-69296-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69296-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960970
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: AfriPics.com / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Boluwatito, Ikeolu, Niniolu
P
reface
Abiola Irele, a prime witness to the birth of modern African literature,
announced in one of the earliest reviews of Achebe’s first novel, Things
Fall Apart1 that what he thought then to be “Nigerian literature” was
born. From his days as a founding editor of The Horn, in the late 1950s,
Irele has been a constant presence in the development of African literary
criticism. It was in the context of this unique profile that his remarks to
Robert Wren, also a pioneer critic of African literature and an early Achebe
scholar, impressed me with their immense gravity: “so far there has been
criticism, the sort of secondary language, the secondary discourse on the
literature, at the top end of the thing. Whereas, you need to also look at
the early material conditions in which this literature was produced. So you
need to do a secondary discourse again, at the other end, the bottom
end.”2 This proposal for literary criticism informed by a bottom-up view
of the interacting forces of the processes of literary production that affect
writing and writers requires an archeological excavation of material condi-
tions first and foremost as a basis for a theory of literature. Thus, the proj-
ect of this book will entail the dual attempts to simultaneously produce an
archeology: a history of the development of African literature in the imme-
diate period after political independence; and a theory of African litera-
ture: an archeotheory that uses that peculiar history as the basis for
recontextualizing and reformulating readings of literary texts.
My research into the archives of Heinemann Educational Books, the
publishers of the widely known African Writers Series (AWS), led quite
early to the uncovering of a lengthy piece by Wole Soyinka originally sub-
mitted as a preface to the paperback edition of Poems of Black Africa, an
vii
viii PREFACE
anthology,3 which he edited. In this piece, Soyinka espouses a withering
critique of the activities of western publishers who were naturally expand-
ing their operations into the emerging markets of newly independent
nations in Africa. Soyinka expressed concern about what western publish-
ers were putting out in the name of African literature, and about the rate
at which this was done in what seemed to be a race among the major
European houses to cultivate a niche in the business of African literary
publishing. Because these publishers were also targeting school markets,
Soyinka worried that the twin factors of foreign and pedagogical media-
tions could permanently define and impact the growth and development
of African literature. The published version of the preface was ultimately
cut down to a few innocuous paragraphs, but the discovery of the full ver-
sion of the original preface in the Heinemann archive lends credence to
Irele’s discontent with top-end rarified theory, or “bloodless criticism,” as
Bernth Lindfors would tag it. Remapping African Literature harkens to
Soyinka’s critique. It does not hesitate to acknowledge direct method-
ological application between critical practices and literary history, or the
sociology of literature; history and sociology remain largely extraneous to
the analysis of texts themselves and to literary criticism. The hesitation in
the field is evident in the divisions between digital methods and historiog-
raphy of the book, which tend to be more invested in empiricism and
material culture, and old-fashioned literary criticism, which is based pri-
marily on the analysis of texts. In fact, in a recent lecture on the use of big
data in the field of contemporary fiction, James English, when asked what
the consequences of these quantitative results should be for understanding
the literature as such, would only go as far as to suggest that these meth-
ods provide guidance for literary criticism. The studies of print culture or
publishing history have significant implications for literary criticism and
theory that cannot be ignored and they can provide new approaches for
understanding the general politics of writing. As Peter Shillingsburg put it
in Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: “[C]ritics might profit from
knowing what editors, who have traced composition, text transmission,
and relations between publishers and authors, can tell us about the context
that an author brings to utterance in the act of creating a work of art.”4
Shillingsburg succinctly articulates that literature must be understood
through a study of the history and imperatives of the cultural relations,
institutions, and industries that produced it. His approach is very much in
line with that of G. Thomas Tanselle, whose important work tracked the
material conditions of book production as integral aspects of intellectual
and cultural history, with the aim of expanding the interpretive and
PREFAC E ix
evidentiary basis for reading and performing textual analysis. This, indeed,
is what is most frequently missed in contemporary theory, because literary
criticism has been so little informed by editorial criticism and the history
of publishing, or by an approach to literary history informed by Marxist
dialectics.
Part of the impulse for this book is to demonstrate that old-fashioned
literary criticism, based primarily on the analysis of texts, could interlock
with the material history of textual production in such a way that the lat-
ter not only provides context but also defines expectations and questions,
and sets the angle by which we approach texts. My aim aligns ultimately
with that of Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary
Market Place.5 Brouillette makes two important arguments: one, that the
material aspects of textual production are “textual in their own right”;6
and two, that reading this “textuality” of material production can be seen
as “an interpretive practice that aims at insights into literature itself.”7
However, rather than viewing literary history and the sociology of litera-
ture as spaces for generating new ideas for literary studies, I take a more
basic approach that views author–publisher, text–institution, subjectivity–
materiality relations as operating dialectically, albeit along multiple axes of
interlocking continuities and discontinuities. A connection could be
established between the ideas and sensibilities expressed in Soyinka’s let-
ters and unpublished preface and his novel that could illuminate the
meaning of the novel, but also significantly expand the scope of the issues
the novel engages, as well as what is at stake in the novel. While context
and methodological guidance are complicated and challenging concepts
for generating literary value, and understanding, it is the interlocking
aspect of the material conditions of the history of the book that I find the
most exciting, especially as it goes beyond meaning and insight, to the
actual possibilities of changing our scholarly orientation.
This book complicates our assumption that writers are all too eager to
get published, and more so through a press that guarantees their works
will reach a wider audience. Before my encounter with Soyinka’s unpub-
lished piece, I had shared the assumption that African writers had an undi-
alectical relationship with foreign publishers. This assumption was in part
an internalization and allegorization of Claude McKay’s exchange with
the great US editor, Frank Harris. And while there are strong geo-political
and racial components to the relationship between African writers and
western publishers in particular, my analysis in this book is not intended to
be read dichotomously in simple black and/versus white terms. Frank
Harris’ reply to McKay clearly packs a lot more into it:
x PREFACE
“Now, tell me frankly,” he said, turning the pages of my scrapbook, “what
was the real underlying urge that forced you to come to America, after you
had achieved a local success in your home? Was it merely to study?” I admit-
ted that back in my mind there had really been the dominant desire to find
a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for high achievement. There, one
was isolated, cut off from the great currents of life.
“I knew that,” Frank Harris said triumphantly. “Your ambition was to
break into the larger literary world—a fine ambition.”8
Another discovery was the manuscript of Chinua Achebe’s “Publishing
in Africa: A Writer’s View,” the published version of which I was later to
find in the US edition of Morning Yet on Creation Day.9 These essays by
Soyinka and Achebe written in the very early period of the 1970s demon-
strate that the writers were concretely concerned with material change,
and not just success. While there can be no denying the ambition to break
into a larger literary world, Soyinka and Achebe were not blinded by their
ambition, or content merely with its fulfillment, but actively engaged in
the deliberate transformation of the apparatuses of production that had
brought them success. Achebe was much changed by the Nigerian civil
war. It was during the war that he got together with the Nigerian poet
Christopher Okigbo in the secessionist state of Biafra to form the Citadel
Press. After the war, and the defeat of the cause he had actively supported,
he wrote in a letter to Heinemann during discussions about the publica-
tion of Girls at War in a tone that confirmed an activist turn: “in any case
my career has been so devoid of complications that I am almost anxious to
invent some!”10 After the war, he was part of the initiative that formed
Nwankwo-Ifejika Ltd., and the Okike magazine. These activities synchro-
nize well with the ideology expressed in the essay referenced above. In this
essay, he argues, “The publisher, must operate in the same historic and
social continuum [with the artist and his people]. It stands to reason that
he cannot play this role from London or Paris or New York.”11
The call for a criticism informed by material conditions and historical
archives of the lives of authors and texts acquires a more insistent tone in
the work of Lindfors, who insists especially on the need for the preserva-
tion of the archives of African literature for future scholarship. Remapping
African Literature attempts to fulfill these persistent demands in African
literary criticism, but then goes on to assess the institutional and material
effects of literary production that permeate creative and critical works. It
explores a counter-question that is seldom asked, or until now unimagi-
nable: to what degree have African writers and African literature funda-
mentally transformed the apparatuses of production and habits of reading?