Lindsey Collen's Narrative Gift: A Challenge to the Commodification of African Literature

Debates over African publishing tend to circulate around long-standing arguments about the appropriate language in which to write and whether it is better (or more ethical) for writers to support local presses or to seek international publishers to promote their writing more globally. In this article, the idea of the gift economy is used to explore how one African writer's publishing practices—Lindsey Collen from Mauritius—can be interpreted as a challenge to such debates. Collen self-identifies as a storyteller (in oral and written narratives) who is gifting her narratives to her audience, which allows an exploration of her novels as more than mere commodities in the material form of published books. Instead, using John Holloway's notion of the "social flow of doing," Collen's publications are seen as only one element in a network of activity that enables the political and activist elements of her work to be foregrounded.