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Research in African Literatures 31.2 (2000) 217-221



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Book Review

New Directions in African Fiction

Contemporary African Fiction


New Directions in African Fiction, by Derek Wright. Twayne's World Author Series 869. New York: Twayne, 1997. 206 pp.

Contemporary African Fiction, ed. Derek Wright. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1997. 266 pp.

Derek Wright has undertaken a risky enterprise--publishing two works on the same subject simultaneously. How can this be done without unnecessary repetition? Even though one work is an collection of essays by several scholars and the other a text exclusively of his own writings, the two volumes treat practically the same authors and works, from similar perspectives.

Thus "The Postcolonial Predicament, 1965-1970," which serves as chapter 1 to New Directions, reprises "Writers and Period" from Contemporary African Fiction. Chapter 4, "Orality and Dictatorship" in New Directions, which treats NgUgI and Farah, is a repeat of "Orature into Literature in Two African Novelists" from Contemporary African Fiction, also concerning NgUgI and Farah. The same is true for "Postmodernism as Realism" from Contemporary African Fiction, of which numerous elements can be found in "Imagined and Other Worlds," chapter 9 of New Directions. Most of the other works/writers analyzed by Wright in New Directions are given broad treatment in Contemporary African Fiction: J. M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Ben Okri, etc. Contemporary African Fiction and New Directions in African Fiction thus appear to be two sides of the same coin, so that reviewing one allows for critiquing the other.

Whatever the case, Contemporary African Fiction is an ambitious undertaking. The study aims at surveying the literary production of the 1980s at the continental level-excluding the Maghreb. In reality, the collection essentially limits its treatment to anglophone literature. Lusophony is absent and francophone writing is only represented through a sort of [End Page 217] overview of the very controversial Calixthe Beyala. Despite the collection's title, the editor has understood the limits of his project: "the essays in this volume do not attempt comprehensive coverage of the fiction of the last twenty years or so, but are selective, their subjects and approaches dictated by the interests of the contributors" (15).

The collection counts seventeen essays written by fourteen scholars based in Africa, North America, Australia, and Europe. The introduction proposes to offer a periodization of African literature. Wright recalls the major dates, the most significant writers and texts: the '60s--literature of disillusionment with Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Serumaga, and Kofi Awoonor; the beginning of the '70s--a call to effective decolonization and the appearance of the debate on what the author calls the Euroassimilationalist mentality, a debate animated by Chinweizu; end of the '70s and beginning of the '80s--the coming of militant artists--NgUgI, Saro-Wiwa--and the birth of a particularly aggressive feminist writing with Bessie Head, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ. The author stresses the importance of the phenomenon of orality and signals the burgeoning of literary institutions in several of the continent's countries.

The work is divided into three parts. Southern Africa claims four studies, eastern Africa five, and western Africa carves out the lion's share with eight. A single essay represents South Africa, justifiably regretted by the editor. That essay, "A Late Bourgeois Tomb: J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and White South African Writing in the Nineteen-Eighties" by Teresa Dovey, considers works by Brink, Gordimer, Olive Schreiner, and Malan, among others. Dovey analyzes the effect of social movements on literary creation, questioning the ties that bind together white writers as well as the vision they project of their own community. Her study is thus an investigation of the torments of a certain South Africa confronted with uncertainties over the future. What, she asks, is the status of the writer? Will it be as mere witness or social actor? Gordimer replies: "It is the political action of Breytenbach and Cronin which invest their writing with 'moral authority'" (52).

The other significant contribution from this section comes from Neil ten...

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