Decolonial Temporalities in Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not

This essay argues that Tsitsi Dangarembga's 2006 The Book of Not stages a subtle and compelling interrogation of what it means to imagine decolonization from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. Signaling affinity with earlier, "first generation" Anglophone African fiction as well as with late twentieth-century conceptions of decolonial political community, and inviting readers to critically reflect on the author's own historical subject-position, Dangarembga's sequel to her 1988 Nervous Conditions troubles prominent theoretical accounts of postcolonial history and literature that revolve around rupture and rigid periodization. The novel asks us to consider what might be gained by envisioning decolonization as a long and still incomplete process whose dynamism is best captured in serial form.