Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity by Russell West-Pavlov (review)

Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity opens with the relentless rap rhythm of the Kenyan poet, journalist, and eponymous “literary gangster” Tony Mochama, whose work communicates a “politics of agency, community and connectiveness” (viii). For Russell West-Pavlov, Mochama’s gangster diction and performance exemplify what the book sets out to accomplish, called an “aesthetics of proximity,” by presenting a compelling diagnosis of the field of contemporary East African literary production. The book offers an exciting insight into East African literary and cultural history since at least the middle of the twentieth century by demonstrating a discerning command of the regional politics, identities, and (hi)stories extant in its literary landscape in English. In exploring how this literary landscape asserts a characteristic regional distinctiveness, the book invites us to appreciate the nuanced implications of “proximity” as an aesthetic category in “East African” writing in English.

The book is divided into three parts that consider three definite but flexible understandings of the term “proximity” vis-à-vis East African literature in English. Each part is subdivided into three chapters. The first part, titled “Territories,” is devoted to the geopolitical categories of “Coast,” “Land,” and “Cities,” which interrogate how the region’s history and territorial immediacy have generated rich narratives of proximity. Land, ocean, and metropolises have been central literary issues in the region’s historical engagements with cartographic histories and post/modernist mappings of colonial cities and littoral zones. From looking at geopolitical proximities in part one, part two of the book, aptly titled, “Histories,” delineates the proximity of historical pasts and the various usages of the past in East African writings.

The second part is chronologically arranged around chapters that survey “Precolonial,” “Colonial,” and “Postcolonial Histories.” In particular, the chapter on “Colonial Histories” offers a compelling read on how anticolonial conflicts like the Maji-Maji Revolution and the Mau-Mau Rebellion, as well as post-independent nationalist projects, are variously appropriated in the fiction of the region to render these “usefully proximate to a post-independent national narrative” (xiii). The spatial and temporal renderings of proximity in parts one and two of the book pave the way for communal and relational proximities in part three.

The third part, called “Communities,” calls attention to three axes of proximity by considering the role of “Gender,” cross-border “Migratory Identities,” and the trans-regional space of “Eastern Africa in the Global South” in its discussion of the region’s literary production. The chapter on “Gender” is especially illuminating for its attention to East African women’s generative agency explored through the fictional depictions of the topoi of feminist consciousness, sexuality, and maternal reproduction. The discussion revisits the much-debated issue of female circumcision (also labeled “genital mutilation” by its critics) as a signifier of the region’s patriarchal control through the works of Rebeka Njau, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Nuruddin Farah. However, it is the chapter’s exploration of African masculinities, the regenerative possibilities inherent in East African feminine selfhoods, and LGBT self-assertions stressed by Susan Kiguli and other women writers that offer innovative and alternative forms of proximate selves evident in the region’s literary experimentations. Correspondingly, the chapter on migration is commendable for its evaluation of intra-regional migration and the movement of multi-ethnic peoples, as opposed to oceanic and intercontinental voyage that is nonetheless a crucial vector of the region’s historiography.

If there is a critique to be made of West-Pavlov’s indispensable study, it is that it neglects to mention the role played by Asian-Ugandans, such as the poet and editor of Transition magazine, Rajat Neogy (1938–95), in the development of the region’s literary consciousness in the 1960s. As pointed out by Transition’s later editors, Anthony Appiah et al., in the aftermath of independence in Africa, intellectuals found Neogy’s magazine a powerfully provocative and stimulating platform from which to debate literary, artistic, and political issues of...