African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race by Olakunle George (review)

Olakunle George's African Literature and Social Change is a timely contribution to the study of African literature in a global framework. George's book intervenes in discourses that have posed terms such as 'tribe', 'nation' and 'race' against the 'global', 'transnational' or 'cosmopolitan', instead limning a more nuanced and contested terrain. He achieves this feat through the study of a number of 'liminal' figures: black missionaries such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the nineteenth century, Pan-African internationalists such as C. L. R. James, Richard Wright and Peter Abrahams in the early to mid-twentieth century, and a re-reading of two of the field's most canonical contemporary writers, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. George focuses on some of the less-studied works – of fiction and non-fiction – of these well-known writers and thinkers, alongside the missionary materials that are not usually considered within the same frame. This slightly shifted archive, timeframe and black-Atlantic geography allow him to make productive comparisons between these figures in what he identifies as three 'missionary moments': times of profound social change in which each man struggles to represent Africa within, and against, the dominant discourses of his time. During these moments of entanglement – the missionary incursion, decolonization and globalization – these authors express affiliations that are simultaneously ethnic, national, Pan-African, Black-Atlantic and global.

African Literature and Social Change challenges the tendency to equate globalism with universalism and reasserts the importance of postcolonial theory, and its attendance to questions of particularity and difference, within a global literary framework. George argues that globalism has been accompanied by a pernicious rhetoric of 'crisis' that leads to incomplete and foreclosed representations: of Africa as a series of failed states and the humanities as a collection of dying disciplines. The representation of Africa as a site of crisis certainly predates our contemporary moment, and George finds that what frequently emerges in response is 'the concept of sacrifice, understood simply as a self-motivating orientation to the world' (p. 103). To this end, the book charts an alternative literary history of moments of African self-writing that engage with and reflect upon sacrifice, arguing that '[t]he contradictory ways that the topos of sacrifice emerges in African writing constitute an instance of particularity that carries universal implications' (p. 16). In Chapters 2–4, George offers the kind of particularized and grounded accounts of postcolonial 'subjects-in-formation' that he proposes in his first theoretical chapter. However, because sacrifice emerges as such a capacious signifier, signifying everything from religious sacrifice to relinquishing tradition in the name of modernity, it can be challenging at times to fully appreciate its theoretical payoff.

With this book, George contributes to a growing body of work that expands the African literary archive as traditionally conceived, making a compelling case for not merely supplementing fictional genres with non-fiction material, but for moving outside a Eurocentric literary framework and its literary/non-literary binary. Drawing on Bakhtin, George demonstrates how a variety of genres can have 'novelization effects' by dialogizing dominant discourses (p. 46). In his chapter on Crowther, George makes perhaps the best use of alternative materials, considering missionary travelogues as well as personal letters and field reports, demonstrating that, although Crowther promulgated standard missionary rhetoric, his writings also reveal an 'unchristian worldliness' (p. 74). In the following chapter on James, Wright and Abrahams, George considers non-fictional works of all but the latter, reading these texts for their literary strategies and ambivalences, arguing, for example, that when James's Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution is read in this mode, it becomes visible as a Black-Atlantic text that places Africa at the centre of global modernity (p. 114). Reading across genres and the literary/non-literary divide helps make visible these texts' multiple affiliations and long-standing globality.

Given that the book reflects only briefly on...