The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988 (review)

Susan Andrade’s study of feminism and nationalism in the African novel has many important strengths. It is clearly argued and theoretically ambitious, aiming to place feminist literature (by male and female authors) within the conversation about nationalist politics that dominated the field in the years immediately following independence. Her study effortlessly glides between anglophone and francophone literatures and she engages seriously with the work of other scholars, providing a good sense of the depth of the field. She argues that novels by African women from this period rarely depict the nation directly, but instead deploy the family as an allegory for the national and, hence, insert themselves into the political conversation through metaphor. She is concerned both with exposing the repeated manifestation of this national allegory and with correcting the reception of this body of fiction as apolitical.

Andrade’s method is often descriptive. She is intent on categorizing texts by form and theme and defining terms. For example, her discussion of Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia begins with an explanation of fantasia, which stands for “the fierce and elegant martial dance for which Algerians were famous and by which they nobly, and often unsuccessfully, fought the French” (172). She goes on to describe the form of the narrative, saying that “the story of the individual is told in chapters that alternate with those on the conquest of Algeria,” or what she calls the “national-historical chapters” (172–73). L’Amour, la fantasia, as many of the novels she focuses on, conforms to the form of the Bildungsroman, “the story of a young girl’s growth to womanhood” (173). Not content to rest here, because Djebar’s novel is a “feminine allegory” that does not bring the story of development to completion, she argues that it must be read as part one of a two-part project, of which Djebar’s Ombre sultane is the second. L’Amour, la fantasia is thus a “Künstlerroman” (“novel of awakening”), she informs us, whose allegory exposes the later text’s own more veiled allegorical meaning by casting its story of women’s relations as a metaphor for the nation (174). As we see here, Andrade works hard to describe and categorize, mapping the literature from this period for a new reader, but also aiming to be rigorous and place the African novel in the broader discussions of the novel as a world genre.

Andrade draws from Fredric Jameson for the theoretical frame of her study. She acknowledges the impossibility of Jameson’s controversial contention that all third-world texts are “necessarily” national allegories (69), yet she usefully deploys his thesis to demonstrate how fictions of domestic relations in the period immediately after independence are allegorical. The exclusion of the feminist texts by Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, and Tsitsi Dangarembga from discussions of the politics of the nation rightfully rankles Andrade, who links these texts to the feminism of Sembène Ousmane and Nuruddin Farah in order to demonstrate the reach of an imagination of the feminine and the national beyond the stereotypical (and contrasting) figures of Mother Africa and the prostitute. These stereotypical figures provide the focus of Florence Stratton’s Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994), the most important precursor to Andrade’s study. Andrade successfully shows the contours of a tradition of women’s novel writing emerging in this period that can inform our reading of contemporary writers such as Chimanda Adichie, Zoë Wicomb, and perhaps Leila Aboulela and Maaza Mengiste.

The book provides careful close readings of canonical texts (Efuru, Joys of Mothershood, Xala, Une si longue lettre, La Grève des bàttu, Maps, Nervous Conditions, and the Djebar novels mentioned above) and works hard to link the readings to each other in a larger frame that addresses novel studies more broadly through attention to genre. To specialists in African literature, some aspects of this project...