African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tejumola Olaniyan
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Methods Of Application

An exploration of African literary studies and what might be its most salient and informed tools of self-constitution and self-understanding in the contemporary moment. More than half a century after formal literary studies emerged in Africa, much of the field is still fixated with a deep suspicion of the true provenance of its own production. The paper theoretically distills some of the expressed or implied evaluative canons of belonging, explores their methods of application, and critically assesses their contemporary relevance—or even resonance. The goal is to arrive at what might be a most enabling conception of African letters for an age I conceive as “post-global.”

An Intellectual History of African Literary Studies?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
African Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Global Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractTwenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

Native Books and the “English Book”

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moradewun Adejunmobi
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
African Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Large Individual ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for granted interstices, hybridity, slippage, and liminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general and The Location of Culture in particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.

The Centre for African Literary Studies: An Opportunity to be Managed?

Mousaion ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Margaret Polak ◽  
Christine Stilwell ◽  
Peter G Underwood ◽  
Ruth Hoskins
Keyword(s):  
Negative Impact ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Significant Finding ◽  
University Of Texas ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Special Collection ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
The University

Libraries contain many collections but professional practice has long recognised the concept of “special collections”. The Centre for African Literary Studies (CALS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa, was established to house the private collection of Bernth Lindfors, a retired professor of English and African literature from the University of Texas, Austin. This article draws on Polak’s study which sought to determine whether universities need designated centres for African studies. She explored the role of CALS as a special collection and in what way the Centre was able to fulfil its role in facilitating and enabling African Studies at UKZN and in the broader community. This article focuses on the challenges of managing CALS as a valuable special collection. Data sources included a literature and document analysis, as well as a survey using questionnaires and personal interviews. The most significant finding was that the original noble vision of the founders to create a centre that boosted the humanities and African literature at UKZN and especially on the Pietermaritzburg campus had been restricted. The establishment of CALS as an externally funded centre had had a negative impact on the endeavours of CALS’s directors who, despite great efforts, had been handicapped in their management of CALS by lack of institutional support, funding and staff tenure. Recommendations for the UKZN which also have relevance for other special collections are made.

scholarly journals From Post-Global to Post-Truth: African Literature beyond Commonsense

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pius Adesanmi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global Age

AbstractThis article discusses Tejumola Olaniyan’s submissions in his essay “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” by problematizing some of his submissions on the temporalities, especially the global and the post-global, that have inflected the field of African literary discourse since the second half of the twentieth century. In doing this, the essay queries the idea that the category of the nation-state has been exhausted or overwhelmed by the global and the post-global. The essay suggests instead that the nation-state has been retooled and rearmed by a nascent temporality, the post-truth, in ways that have significant consequences for African literatures.

scholarly journals The Ethics of African Studies in the Age of Oga Politics: A Response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s “African Literature in the Post-Global Age”

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-295
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
Global South ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Being

AbstractIn response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

Friction and Expansion: Comparative Literary Studies as Chimerical Form

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-121
Author(s):  
Nicole Rizzuto
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Global Age

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’sChimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices ofChimeras of Formby expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

scholarly journals Svetovna primerjalna književnost

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Blaž Zabel
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Global Age ◽  
David Damrosch

David Damrosch: Comparing the Literatures. Literary Studies in a Global Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 386 str.

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