Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore Edited by Jennifer Wawrzinek and J. K. S. Makokha (review)

This collection of essays is a welcome addition to African scholarship on narrative arts. Although certain parts of the volume suffer from problems that could have been easily solved, the essays do, nonetheless, represent significant interventions into complex issues surrounding the reconstitution of identities in African, primarily urbanized contexts. The volume also attempts to move away from the dominance of discourses about Africa from European and North American institutions and therefore features authors from Tanzania, Kenya, and Nigeria, among other countries. This provides the reader with a variety of perspectives on issues of importance to scholars of African literature and, oftentimes, with access to materials available only in Africa, including graduate research work. These same works are often grounded in the lived experiences of the scholars themselves, which are made use of in tandem with published works to provide a fuller picture of the realities with which African literatures are grappling. From a theoretical standpoint the collection is founded in the ideas expressed by Achille Mbembe in which he emphasizes the shifting and cosmopolitan nature of African peoples’ experiences. This is a crucial observation that opens up a distinct trajectory of thought about identities in Africa and works against the outmoded (if it was ever valid) perception that African lives are ruled by tradition and stasis rather than fluid systems of associations.

One of the most remarkable and desirable aspects of the anthology is that it seeks to cover a large spectrum of sub-Saharan African writers. The compilation also makes an effort to include African literature north of the Sahara, with a single article that deals with Frantz Fanon and Driss Chraïbi. In addition there is an attempt made to include works other than those written in English, although this is primarily limited to French, with a single chapter on lusophone writing by the Angolan author Pepetela. A notable exception to this emphasis on English- and French-language literature is certainly the essay by Alina N. Rinkanya, which deals with Sheng literature from Kenya. In this particular case the focus upon Sheng provides a valuable and rarely trodden inroad into the real manner in which discourses much closer to the common pulse of the country are carried out.

Many of the chapters focus upon specific works by specific authors such as Nuruddin Farah, Moyez Vassanji or Wole Soyinka, Patrice Nganang, and Ben Okri. Other scholars make use of specific works in order to provide insight into an entire national literary tradition. A case in point is the chapter on Goretti Kyomuhendo’s novel Waiting, which succeeds in providing a vision of the oftentimes fractured progression of Ugandan postcolonial history and how it has played out through literary expression. Another commendable characteristic of the collection lies in the fact that the authors have taken on the increasingly important task of confronting the reality of “minority” communities such as the Afro-Asians in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. A wide variety of authors such as Peter Nazareth, the omnipresent M. G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Yusuf Dawood are explored in no fewer than five essays—in fact, the entire third part of the book, entitled “Unhomeliness, Diasporic Narration, Heteretopia.”

All of this being said, there are a few nagging issues that flare up into serious problems at times. The first of these is that there is an apparent lack of copy editing, which manifests itself in, at times, obvious ways. Although ultimately this problem does not diminish the significance of the scholarship itself, it does make for fairly turgid reading at times. This lack of attention to editing even at times bursts out into statements that seem to border on the problematic, to say the least, such as the following: “In Starbook, the prince is the sacrifice just like Olunde in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the...