African City Textualities (review)

Despite the unfortunate jargon in its title, Ranka Primorac’s small collection of essays deserves attention as a worthwhile departure from the routine of even relatively diverse cultural studies scholarship. In addition to presenting the work of scholars potentially unfamiliar to their American colleagues, the volume visits a series of places and moments somewhat off the beaten paths of African literary studies. The collection “aims to document some of the creativity and vibrancy with which African city dwellers participate in global flows and exchanges—focusing in particular on the flows and exchanges of texts and textual elements. Instead of conceiving of African urban identities and locations in terms of misdirected or truncated modernity, the chapters here tease out some of the complex shifting and travelling of meanings involved in the making of African city subjectivities and senses of the modern” (1). That not all of the essays seem actually to do this proves less important than what they do manage to accomplish: individually, many of them offer valuable coverage of hitherto rarely-treated subjects, while collectively, they stimulate scholarly reflection on the increasingly urban nature of African cultural life.

Rather than review systematically all the chapters (which originally appeared in the August 2008 special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing), it seems more useful to alert readers to the range of topics they cover, and then comment more on the most thought-provoking among them. Following Primorac’s introduction, the book includes: Donal Cruise O’Brien on the political and economic relationship between Dakar and rural Senegal; Stephanie Newell on self-help literature from Nigeria; Joel Isabirye on the late Ugandan musician Philly Lutaaya’s advocacy around HIV/AIDS; Grace Musila on the study of rumor in the Kenyan polity; Ranka Primorac on the Zambian author Sekelani Banda’s detective fiction; Laura Miti-Banda’s newspaper editorial on the disjunction between Lusaka and its hinterland; Meg Samuelson on contemporary representations of Sophiatown, South Africa; Terence Ranger on oral history in Bulawayo; James Graham on the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić; Rita Nnodim on Lagos in contemporary Nigerian fiction; and Jennifer Robinson on “modernity and transformation” in African cities.

Most of the essays address (at least in their opening statements the by now thoroughly undermined conventional perspective that views African cities as the sites of an essentially destructive struggle between a couple of well-known polar opposites, “tradition” and “modernity.” Yet a number of the authors go well beyond knocking down this rather battered (and suspiciously convenient) opponent. The usual course in such arguments involves demonstrating the presence of some “alternative modernity,” frequently by documenting unusual, innovative, or contestatory uses of urban space among Africans. To some extent, this constitutes a major tactic in the essays by Newell, Primorac, Samuelson, and Ranger. Yet it does not represent the book’s final word on the subject. First, these four authors themselves do not envision the tactic as a panacea or a “Get Out of Binarism Free” card. Second, other authors outline the limitations of any search for alternative modernities. James Graham allows that “while it is necessary to recognize the new ways in which people are making use of the ‘old’ city, the memory of that city, with its separations and inequalities encoded within its very fabric, still has a significant bearing on the present” (93). His caution seems salutary, and his understanding of nuance, typical of the best thinking in this volume.